


Beach Blanket Poltergeist

by hansbekhart



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Early in Canon, Gen, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-21
Updated: 2006-09-22
Packaged: 2018-07-12 11:17:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7100956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They come from the north, exhausted by the sprawling highways and overpasses of Silicon Valley.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

  


  
  


 

They come from the north, exhausted by the sprawling highways and overpasses of Silicon Valley. They put miles between them and the cantankerous spirit of a Gold Rush miner who threw them around a bit and went grumbling into his long overdue rest, salted and burned. It is hot in the mountains above Napa but it grows cooler the closer they get to the ocean. Sam takes over the driving somewhere past San Francisco, when Dean finally throws up his hand in disgust at six lanes of traffic and hardly a driver who knows what he's doing.

Dean falls asleep in Hayward, his arms crossed over his chest and a frown on his face. His chin sinks down into his chest, giving him a triple chin that Dean would absolutely take a picture of if Sam sleeping that way. Sam glances at his brother and then away, grinning. He is almost to Los Gatos when he finally gives in and digs his camera phone out of his pocket.  
  
Sam knows the area well; Palo Alto and Stanford lie inland and if he left 101 at Embarcadero, he'd be back at his old apartment in no time. Jess had been a native to the area and had driven him all over in the early days of their relationship. They'd made the trip over the mountains several times to escape the heat of Silicon Valley in the summer or to eat the best Mexican food Sam had ever had. Even the air smells the same, that mixture of smog and eucalyptus and the promise of the ocean. Sam cranks the window down and breathes deeply, something easing and tightening in his chest at the same time.  
  
He stops for gas and snacks before they hit the Santa Cruz Mountains. Dean is awake when Sam walks back to the car, staring blearily out the window at the cars passing by. He meets Sam's eyes and tracks him all the way across the parking lot, his gaze expressionless. The car door shrieks when Sam opens it and slides inside.

"Where are we?" Dean grumbles, starting to life and rubbing a hand over his face.

"Los Gatos," Sam replies. "About a half an hour outside of Santa Cruz," he adds when Dean gives him a dark look. He says it the way the natives do, blurring it together into one word, unconsciously: Sannacruz. He tosses Dean the newspaper without looking at him, most of his attention saved for his soda. He watches it fizz rather than watch Dean unfold the paper and scan the front page.

"Apple Rivers -- seriously? -- 20 years old, found murdered in Mission Plaza last night. No witnesses, no leads. Body was slashed, mutilated and partially dismembered." He glances over at Sam. "That makes five bodies in two weeks, all women, all murdered in the same little courtyard thing outside of Holy Cross Church. The town thinks it has another serial killer. Not exactly a rare occurrence for the area."

"Yeah," Sam says. "But they don't know what we do."

They had been tipped off when the second death had hit the papers with the only lead that the case had so far: a tiny bit of wire that had broken off in the girl's eye socket. Hand-forged, rusted so badly that it was little more than dust, more than a hundred years old. The name of the town had sparked some connection in Dean's brain that sent him leafing through Dad's journal to find a page with POGONIP scrawled across the top in dark letters.

"You sure this isn't just some serial killer?" Dean had griped, even though the link had been made in Dad's journal, normally Dean’s bible. "It's not like they haven't had a million of them in Santa Cruz." They had come anyway, regardless of Dean's inexplicable need to hustle them as far away from California as possible. He wouldn't shut up about how much he hated California until Sam asked him why.

Sam digs his phone out of his pocket as they pull out of the parking lot, Dean back at the wheel, and passes it over without a word. The Impala idles for a long moment at the intersection as Dean frowns down at his own triple chin, now the background for Sam's phone.

Sam barely sees Dean's hand fly out and clip him along the head, but he laughs hard anyway and plucks his phone from the ground where Dean threw it.

They take Summit Road through the mountains, the Impala swinging madly, seduced by tight curves and lifts of interminable hills and dragging eucalyptus. The light is cool and dappled and Dean puts his face outside the window to see if he can smell the ocean. Signs for back road churches, sedate horses in hand-built corrals, fields of baby Christmas trees roll past them as the ocean grows ever closer. They don't talk. Dean eats Cheetos and Sam plows his way through a water bottle and a half before they get to Old San Jose Rd, the turn coming suddenly and knocking Dean's Cheetos off his lap.

"Dude!" he says, flinging up a hand. Sam laughs until Dean leans over and rubs orange crumbs all over his clean shirt.

"Bitch!" Sam returns, and pushes his brother into the window.

Santa Cruz in the summertime is all greens and golds, loamy earth and ferns that haven't seen the sun since the redwoods that cover them were young, hundreds of years ago. The Impala passes through shafts of sunlight and the air around them is cool and dry, mottled with dust. They crest a hill and there is the ocean, laid out before them, too far off to glitter in the sunlight. Sam grins when he sees it, but Dean's attention is on the mountain.

It's early afternoon when they pass a park that has three enormous blue balls rolling down a grassy hill. Dean, whose sense of humor still hovers around the level of a small child's, cracks up. They roll into a town that seems to be teeming with children, hefting backpacks and shouting to each other. The Impala attracts attention and Dean huffs an appreciative sort of laugh when they get in line behind several gleaming muscle cars waiting for the light to change.

Old San Jose drops them off on the other side of town from their destination, so they make for the motel first. It overlooks a long stretch of beach and a small cluster of buildings in various pastel shades and covered in a ridiculous amount of gables and plants. Across the river stretches an old wooden trestle, crisscrossing redwood beams breaking up the view down the river. It's so picturesque that Dean actually sneers at it, looking around himself with something approaching disbelief.

The scent of kelp and salt clings to their room and Dean wrinkles his nose. "You wanna go hit the parents?" Dean asks.

"I'd like to check out the church while we're out," Sam says. “There could be some sort of spirit hanging around there.”

Dean nods. "Or," he says slowly, as though the thought has just occured to him, "it could be a serial killer and not our deal."

Sam frowns at him, frustrated. "What is your problem, Dean? You’ve been acting really weird lately."

Dean smirks at him. "Nothin'. Come on, Sammy, let's hit the road."

 

  
  


 

Apple Rivers' parents turn out to be an older hippie couple who introduce themselves as Dharmananda and Phoenix. Neither appears to have shaved in at least five years and Sam barely holds back a grin as Dean utterly fails to cope. They're FBI agents today and Sam conducts most of the interview, as Dean doesn't seem to be able to say any of the names of the River family without losing control.

"Had your daughter mentioned anything ... out of the ordinary lately?" Sam asks, sympathetic face on. They accept two mugs of tea that smell like gasoline and taste like gunpowder and out of the corner of his eye, Sam watches Dean struggle not to make faces.

"Nothing," Phoenix says, pushing a shock of bright copper hair back from her pale face. Her eyes, reddened and lined, are almost steady as she speaks in a low, even voice. "She never mentioned anything like that. She would have told us if there had been anybody following her or giving her trouble."

"Your daughter lived at home?" Dean asks.

Phoenix nods without looking at them, gulping her tea. “Rent’s a bitch here,” she says frankly. “Apple goes - went to UCSC, it’s a lot of money on top of that. We were helping her with tuition if she lived at home to keep the cost down. We ... we liked having her here, with us ...”

"What sort of people was she involved with?" Sam asks gently.

Dharmananda had hovered over his wife's shoulder up to this point, moving restlessly around the room but always returning to Phoenix's side. He puts a hand down protectively on her shoulder and scowls at them. "Good kids," he says forcefully. "Mostly her friends from high school. We've known them all for years and that's exactly what we told the other cops. She wasn't involved in a gang and she wasn't a Satanist. She was a good girl."

"Daddy doth protest a bit much," Dean says later, in the car.

"No," Sam says slowly. "I think that was genuine."

Dean is silent for a moment, pondering the case or boobs or the meaning of life, Sam doesn't know. "So she wasn't a Satanist, which probably rules out some sort of demon."

"Unless the victims were being targeted by Satanists," Sam replies.

"In which case we should find signs of that at the site," Dean counters. "What else would it be? You said that there's a large Hispanic population here. It could be a chupacabra."

"Could also be related to the church. We should look into the history of it after we see it."

"That’s all yours, college boy," Dean grumbles.

Dean is silent as they drive and that in itself would be unsettling to Sam. The clear light that filters in through the Impala's windows picks up the tense line of his jaw, the stubble that covers his skin. They haven't slept well lately; the miner had tossed them around pretty well and Sam had to relocate Dean's shoulder. Dean still looks terrible even when he's in the car, his own personal comfort zone.

"So what’s your problem, Dean?" Sam asks finally. Dean looks at him and then away, his mouth quirking.

"Nothing, like I said. Man, look at this traffic. This sucks." His posture is relaxed, one arm hanging over the front seat of the Impala behind Sam's back, the faintest smile touching his lips, but he's looking at their surroundings as though they’re going to rear up and attack him.

Sam wants to reach for him, clap a hand around the back of his neck or something, but there’s a hell of a personal chasm between the two of them that sprung up when he left for college that Sam doesn’t know how to bridge, even after all these months on the road.

_A guy could break something trying to get to Dean_ , Sam thinks sourly, and settles deeper into his seat.

 

  
  


 

Mission Plaza is sunny, hot, and full of official looking people. Yellow tape strings a clear line of demarcation around where Apple Rivers died, an impressive spatter of blood still soaking the ground. Dean whistles, as insensitive to Apple's murder as he was to her parents, and digs his Walkman-cum-EMF reader out of the trunk. He ignores Sam's snort of derision and they trace their way around the park, drawing nonchalantly close to study a sign post that reads May Peace prevail on Earth in four different languages. Sam expects Dean to sneer at it, but he says nothing. The cops look at them suspiciously, but only until their gazes move on to the next pedestrian hovering cautiously around the edge of the park.

"Cruciform," Dean says softly, with the slightest nod of his head towards the blood splatter.

"Yeah," Sam says. He had noticed.

Sam follows Dean's lead but his thoughts keep wandering. He can hear the beat of some enormous heart on the edge of his consciousness, feels it pulse and wash forward and back like an ocean wave, like a caress. As if in reaction, Dean maintains a nearly feral attention to the EMF reader and his surroundings, examining everything he can reach without attracting attention. He crouches just a little bit as he walks, a posture learned nearly at Dad's knee and certainly with his approval.  
  
The meter goes up the closer they get to the church and when they step though the arches about thirty feet before the church façade, it's as though ice water has been poured over Sam's head, extinguishing the unnatural contentment that had wrapped itself around him. He shivers and nudges Dean. "Good feeling gone," he murmurs, and Dean looks at him as though he's an idiot.  
  
"I think we've found our problem," Dean says grimly.

“Haunted church?” Sam asks, retreating back between the arch to the safety on the other side.

“Could be,” Dean says thoughtfully. “She wasn’t anywhere near the church when she died.” He stares down at the EMF reader as if it holds the answers.

“What about cursed Indian ground?” Sam says, tipping his head back to stare at the sky.

Dean shrugs. “Come on, dude, I’m done with this. Let’s get out of here.”

 

  
  


  


 

They retreat back to the motel. Sam sits out on the balcony and enjoys the view and the free wireless while Dean showers. There are few better sounds than the noise of children playing at a distance, their shouts echoing off the swell of saltwater, mimicked by the seagulls that land on the balcony's railing and stare blankly at Sam. "Mine?" Sam asks them, and then feels stupid for referencing a children's movie twice in one day.  
  
Dean shuffles out onto the balcony after a while. There is a towel slung low around his hips and another in his hand, which he uses to dry his hair but not the beads of water still clinging to his chest and stomach. "Find anything?" he asks.  
  
"Yeah," Sam replies. "A lot. Maybe a lot more than we bargained for, actually. I've definitely found our ghost, by the way. Holy Cross was built on top of what used to be one of the missions that the Spanish built all along the coastline. They were basically frontier posts for Spanish colonies back then; this one in particular was built by Franciscan monks in, uh, 1791."  
  
"I know you're getting to the point soon," Dean says, peering at Sam from between folds of terrycloth. Sam smacks him hard on the shoulder and continues, ignoring Dean's bark of laughter.  
  
"The point is, one of the friars, Father Andres Quintana, was famous for abusing the native women ... for beating them with a wire-tipped horsewhip," Sam said significantly. "And - get this - one night in 1812, the Mission laborers rose up and murdered him by crushing his testicles. Then they just put him back in bed as though nothing had happened. Nobody even knew he was murdered until several years later, when one of the conspirators spilled the beans."  
  
Dean winces. "He got his balls mashed? What the hell, man. That is a _fucked up_ way to die. I’d rather be smothered in a demon’s asshole. It sounds like our guy, all right. Does it say where he’s buried?"  
  
"Well," Sam says, "the mission fell into disrepair around 1840 ... the church that sits on top of it now wasn't built until 1891, so I'd guess that they moved the bodies to some other cemetery in the area, which will be a bitch to figure out exactly where. There was an earthquake after Quintana's death that destroyed most of the records."

"Super," Dean says. "Any guesses?"

"Um. The mission cemetery lay along the east side of the old mission church, going from the southeast corner all the way to the northeast. There was another church built on the site in 1858 and most of the graves were moved then, so hopefully he's - oh."

Dean glances up. " _'Oh'_ doesn't sound good."

"This article says specifically that Quintana's bones were found and then reinterred in 1885 …" Sam glances up and meets Dean's eyes. "… in a stone casket underneath the floor of the new church."

Dean laughs. He finally lets up on his hair and starts absentmindedly rubbing the towel over his chest. "All right, that'll be a blast. So to speak. Hey, you remember that time in Jersey, when you fell through the chapel floor?"

"Vividly," Sam says dryly. He had spent two hours back at the motel that night lying on his stomach as their dad had picked splinters out of his bare ass and Dean mocked him from the corner.

Dean cackles to himself and then says, "So what did you mean by more than we bargained for, anyway?"

"It's like this town is tailor-made for us, Dean," Sam says softly. "I went looking for articles about the mission and just while you were in the shower, I found about a hundred other things that would be worth checking out. Santa Cruz used to be known as the Murder Capital of the World because there was a mass murderer and two separate serial killers operating in the area in the early 1970's. Hitchcock's "The Birds" was based on a freak incident just a few miles away from where we're sitting now; the house that inspired "Psycho" is here and was a stomping ground for Satanists, there's a White Lady on Graham Hill Road, a ghost called Pogonip and an Indian curse over the entire area. I'm telling you, man, I think there's something deeper going on here."

Dean is silent for a long moment, his fingers folded in his lap, before he gets up and vanishes back into the room without a word. The sky is plastered against the glass and the only motion that Sam can see in it is the swoop of sea gulls above the ocean. He follows Dean inside to find his brother getting dressed, jaw firmed, eyes blank. Dean doesn't look at him as he tugs his jeans up and squats by their duffle bags for a clean shirt.

"Is there something that you're hiding from me?" Sam asks finally, crossing his arms and leaning against the doorframe. "Is this going to be like the shtriga, where I find out you have some guilt complex relating to letting me watch "Psycho" as a little kid? I didn't have nightmares about that until you dressed up as Norman Bates and scared the crap out of me in the shower."

Dean glances up at him and smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. "That's a pretty long list, Sammy boy. Sounds like that's something that would take us way too long to really check out."

"Wouldn't it be worth it, if it ended up saving people's lives?" Sam asks.

"Which shirt?" Dean asks, holding up two identical shirts. "There were some smokin' girls down there. If we're gonna go get dinner soon, I'd like to dress to impress."

"Dean," is all that Sam needs to say.

"Look, dude," Dean says, bracing his palms on his knees to stand. He walks over to Sam and claps a hand on his shoulder. "I get it. You miss the Joe College thing - especially with all of the babes around, jeez. Man, it was bad enough that you held out on me about frat parties, now I find out that California is some sort of babe mecca or something. You wanna find some surfer chick to bang, all you gotta do is say so, dude. You don't need to make up ghost stories."

"Dean," Sam says again, slowly. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Dean cups his hands in front of his bare chest and winks before turning back and selecting an entirely different t-shirt to wear. He says nothing further and Sam lets it go.

 

  
  


 

They have dinner in a place with a cheesy bar that is thatched with straw to look like a hut but long windows that look over where Soquel Creek empties out into the Pacific Ocean. It's sunset and the light blinds them at first, but by the time Dean gets the waitress' number, it's bearable and they're settled in with cheeseburgers and onion rings.  
  
Dean takes a long pull of his beer - the waitress gave them the second round on the house - and says, "So what's the plan, Sammy boy? I don't really feel like blowing a hole through a church floor tonight."

"There has to be another way down there," Sam says thoughtfully. He rests his chin on the heel of his palm and stares out into middle distance, unappreciative of the scenic beauty. Faintly, he can hear the bark of sea lions. "Ok, so if he's buried underneath the church, then there has to be other tombs down there. The other friars that served the mission were probably reinterred below Holy Cross as well, right?"

"So we're talking about a crypt below the church," Dean says, looking interested. "That'd be easier to deal with, especially since we ran out of dynamite back in Oregon. Although I bet Caleb's pipe bomb recipe would -"

"Dean, we're not blowing up the church," Sam says severely. Dean's answering grin is half rueful, half defensive.

"Live a little, Sammy," he says, his eyes on their waitress. "You know, maybe I could hook you up. I bet she's got hot friends. Quit lookin' at me like that, man. What, you’d rather hold hands and talk about your feelings?"

"Normal human beings talk about their feelings," Sam says, eyebrow arched. "Is that why you don't?"

Dean frowns. "Don't what?" he asks.

"Don't be stupid," Sam shoots back, "Talk about your feelings. Ever.”

Something quick and fleeting crosses Dean’s face, but it’s gone so quickly that Sam only sees it because he is looking for it; so quickly that he isn’t sure if Dean was even aware of it.

His brother grins. "That's because the only feelings I need sound like this: oh, _Dean_." To Sam's embarrassment, Dean throws his head back and moans, thrusting his pelvis up in an obscene motion that is, thankfully, mostly covered by their table. His hands come up to grab at invisible titties and he doesn't quit it even when Sam throws a French fry at his head and hisses furiously at him to stop.

His brother's mock orgasm is shamelessly loud and only slightly muffled by Sam's hand clapped over Dean's mouth. He can feel Dean's body shaking with laughter underneath his fingers before Dean's mouth opens wide and licks a wet, disgusting stripe up Sam's hand. He leans back in his chair when Sam pulls away in disgust and tips a wink at their waitress. "That's a little preview just for you, sweetheart."

Unbelievably, she laughs, blushing.

Sometimes, Sam really hates his brother.

 

  
  


 

  
They are silent on the ride to Holy Cross, an easy silence that has been trained into them over the years. "Like riding a bicycle," Dean said to Sam that night he appeared in Palo Alto after two years of nothing, two years of normal and safe before Sam had slipped the mask off and discovered that it felt better then ever to not to wear it. Dad and Dean had always shielded Sam and kept him safe, left him on the outskirts with a shotgun to keep watch instead of on the front lines with them but in spite of that, Sam falls into step easily when they are on the hunt, focus narrowing and widening to take in all and absorb it without thought.

They’re good at what they do. The Impala purrs as Dean slides into an empty parking spot alongside the Mission Chapel and they gather their weapons from the trunk. Salt, lighter fluid, crosses, a shotgun loaded with rock salt apiece and a handgun for Dean, just in case. Knives and a sledgehammer, heavy in Sam's hand until he throws it into the duffel bag. The weight of their arsenal on his shoulder feels good, natural, and he falls into step with his brother as they move across the plaza, boots slapping on stone echoed by the impassive fountain. Nothing stirs.

Dean pauses before they reach the arches. He turns and looks at Sam, his face serious. “Hey,” he says, and Sam stops. “You think that you could really die, getting your balls crushed? I mean, I could see it if you get ‘em ripped completely off, but just crushed?”

“Dean,” Sam says, after a beat. “What the hell.” He shakes his head and keeps walking.

“Seriously, though,” Dean insists, stepping quickly to catch up. “It’s bugging the shit out of me.”

They step under the stone arch without fear of discovery or attack. They hold their guns at ready out of habit, no questions asked as Sam lays his gun at his side to pick the lock of the church doors and Dean stands at his heels, covering his brother's exposed back. They are inside in seconds.

They stand ready beneath the entryway for breathless seconds before moving to flank the redwood baptismal font. They pause only for a second to dip their fingers in the water and cross themselves.

Holy Cross Church is an enormous, narrow building with cathedral ceilings painted with elaborate gold ikons of saints that look fiercely down upon the parishioners below. The altar is huge and intimidating, crowned by a larger than life statue of Jesus upon his cross, flanked by weeping angels. Dean nods upwards; the heavy chandeliers high above their head are swaying through the still cloistered air, throwing an ever widening shadow across the ground. The darkness behind Jesus' twisted body writhes.

They turn as one and see the spirit of Father Andres Quintana above them in the organ loft, whip raised, face bloodied and furious. He stands with his legs wide as though he has both feet planted on the railing instead of hanging in the air, blood staining his habit and running in sickening drops down the iron rail. His mouth is open in a deafening howl of hatred and pain.

"Jesus," Dean begins to say, and then Quintana is gone.

There is only the barest flicker of movement to warn them and then Quintana's arm comes down and brings the whip across Sam's back. A burning explosion of pain blossoms across his back, so much more intense and terrifying than Sam could have dreamed, each hook catching and tearing at his flesh. He screams. His legs drop out from under him and then Dean is there, shotgun deafening. Dean's hands are under his arms, pushing him back, and all that Sam can see are shadows dancing across gleaming wood. Quintana is faster than them, bigger. The rotten cloth that covers his body reeks of dust and the heavy stench of blood. Quintana's whip cuts through the air and takes out a chunk of the pew beside Dean's hand before he vanishes again. They are in motion immediately, not waiting for another attack; Dean propels Sam towards the altar and the alcoves behind it. They’re running full tilt up the aisle and when Quintana reappears directly before them, there’s no time to react, much less dodge.

The whip catches Dean on the left side of the face. He slips and goes down hard against the edge of a pew, the crack of his skull against the polished edge eclipsed by Sam's own gun. Dean chants angry curses as he hauls himself to his feet and they scrabble towards the altar.

In 1989, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake rocked the San Francisco Bay Area. It originated ten miles above Santa Cruz and killed an estimated 67 people. Dean had turned ten that year and had been transfixed by the sight of that red car on their television screen, teetering on the edge of the collapsed Bay Bridge. The damage to Santa Cruz county had been so widespread that when a wall below Holy Cross had been torn open to reveal a series of catacombs that had been sealed tightly for over a century, it had simply been noted, plastered over, and then forgotten.

It is this that they are making for.

Dean kicks the alcove door open rather than waste time picking the lock and Sam is on his knees as soon as they are through, laying down a thick line of salt along the doorway. "You think that'll keep him?" Sam asks, but Dean only grunts and angrily swipes blood out of his eyes.

"Come on," he says, but Sam grabs his ankle.

"How's your head?"

Dean glares at him. "It's fine, come on, we don't –"

"How's your head?" Sam says again, cutting Dean off.

"How's your back?" Dean counters, and then relents. "I didn't get knocked out, I can move around fine, my fucking head just hurts. Can we go salt and burn this asshole or do you want to make sure that my diaper is dry, too?"

"Fine," Sam mutters, "Excuse me for being concerned. Let's go."

He digs their flashlights out of the duffel bag and holds one out for Dean to take. They're in a narrow corridor and Sam fumbles for the lights. Dean, impatient, clicks on his flashlight and –

"Did you see that?" Dean's voice is low and intent. There is a highlight on his nose and forehead from the flashlight but the rest of his body is invisible in the gloom.

"See what?" Sam asks. "Is it Quintana?"

"No, too small – could've sworn there was someone standing at the bottom of the stairs - "

Dean lapses into silence and they stand ready, every muscle straining towards reaction. The stairwell below them is silent. The only thing that they can hear is each other's labored breathing.

Dean takes point, sliding forward along the wall, his movements quick and economic. Sam follows, duck-walking backwards down the steps, gun and attention trained on the door leading back to the church. There is a storage room at the bottom of the stairs piled high with folded tables and brightly colored posters made out of felt and behind them, a pale crack in the wall that was never painted to match the rest of the room. Together, they clear a space to work. Dean takes the sledgehammer from Sam.

Even dazed and bloody, taking down the wall is quick work. The plaster covers a badly patched crack that runs from the ceiling to the floor. The flashlight shakes in Sam's hand as the wound on his back reminds him of its presence, his first adrenaline surge fading. He can feel his shirt sticking to his skin as the cloth is soaked through with blood and sweat; every movement of his shoulders feels as though it is splitting his skin wide open. "Hurry up," Sam grits out between his teeth.

Dean spares a quick, irritated glance over his shoulder and smears a hand over his face. "Don't rush genius," he says, and the wall comes down.

They reel back from the smell. Even high on the hill, away from the flood plains that used to cover downtown Santa Cruz, the ground has had over a century to absorb winter rains. It’s a heavy smell, almost physical in its presence, chilled by the lack of sun that never reaches into its depths. Another swing widens the crack, knocks bricks from their places and sends them spinning into blackness. And in the dark, as Sam brings his flashlight up below his gun the way their father taught them, he sees the shine of eyes.

He doesn't drop the gun, but it's a close thing. His voice rings out, warningly: "Dean." His eyes don't waver from the figure that stands improbably opposite them, dark skin a blur to the flashlight, but he can see Dean heft the sledgehammer as if he can use it against the spirit. It is still and it holds their gaze and then flickers out of sight.

"What the fuck," Dean breathes.

"That wasn't Quintana," Sam echoes.

There is a rough hewn stairway below them and they descend into Stygian darkness that pays no heed to their meager light. Cobwebs disintegrate as they brush Sam's skin, dust settling on their clothes. Even the sound of Dean's boots on stone seems swallowed up by the catacombs.

"Something's wrong," Sam says. "There's no way there should be so many tunnels down here. The mission was only active for fifty years or so, there shouldn't be more than a handful of priests buried down here."

"There it is again," Dean growls. He swings his shotgun towards the ghost but it’s gone before the motion is complete.

Sam wants to say, _it's quiet_. Wants Dean to reply, _too quiet_. Except that it isn't quiet, not really; there is a sound that waits on the edge of his consciousness as they move through endless corridors, past endless coffins piled haphazardly atop one another. It sounds almost like breathing, or an enormous heartbeat, or the ocean; it swallows all sound and thought just like the darkness has swallowed them. Hours have passed, or minutes, and although Quintana's spirit hasn't found them, they can't seem to find Quintana's bones. Every noise makes them jump, convinced that the line of salt didn’t stop Quintana. Every shift of dirt beneath their feet sounds like his whip slicing through the air, invisible in the catacombs. Their flashlights reveal narrow walls that glisten under the shine of light, little flecks of white among that dirt that look like teeth or the bones of children and every once in a while find wet black eyes that stare silently at them.  
  
Sam stumbles and nearly goes down, dizzy with pain and claustrophobia, and Dean grabs his shoulder and presses him against the wall. Dean's fingers clench on his shirt and then turn him around, silently examining the torn fabric of Sam's jacket, the shirt beneath.

“This sucks,” he grunts wearily and drops his head onto Sam’s shoulder.  
  
“You can’t even see straight, can you?” Sam pants. Dean is silent, his fingers still gripping the hem of Sam’s t-shirt. “I knew you weren’t ok, why can’t you just -”

“Can’t do anything about it right now, can I?” Dean says through gritted teeth. Sam has no reply for that.

He’s tired. They’re both tired, the sort of bone-deep exhaustion that normally only hits Sam hours after a hunt, when the adrenaline has worn off and his brain is finished rehashing everything that happened. And Sam _hates_ being mindfucked by what they hunt, hates his perceptions being screwed with, hates doubting his own capabilities, it drives him insane. Their flashlights flicker and for a long moment Sam holds his breath like he hasn’t done since he was a child. They stay lit and he lets his head fall forward against the wall with a grateful hiss and for a moment, the world goes gray.  
  
He comes back to himself when Dean grabs the back of his skull and shakes it. “You think I’m messed up?” he mutters against Sam’s shoulder blade. “Look who’s talking, pass-out boy.”

Sam rolls off of the wall with a concentrated effort, one hand going to steady Dean when his brother reels drunkenly towards the opposite wall. “Pass-out boy?” he asks. “That’s all you can come up with? You really do have a concussion.”  
  
It’s a long moment before Sam is alert enough to feel how tense Dean is beneath his hand, to notice how Dean has gone still and watchful like a dog. His attention turns away from Sam so quickly that Sam almost forgets how Dean had nearly fallen only a moment ago. When Sam turns and sees what Dean’s already noticed, adrenaline rushes back into his body like a shot.

Standing at some distance from them is a small child with dark skin and a rounded belly, wrapped in striped burlap cloth belted around the middle. It stares at them with empty, lifeless eyes, its mouth bruised and face smeared with dirt. A man with feathers in his hair appears behind the child, blood still dripping from the jagged weals that cross his face. Then a woman with heavy, bare breasts; another child; then an old man, their eyes fixed uncaring upon the barrels of the Winchester’s shotguns until, as one, they raise their hands - and _point_.  
  
“What the shit?” Dean hisses.

“I think - I think they’re trying to help us,” Sam says disbelievingly.

Dean blinks rapidly, his focus unwavering. “Help us.”

They edge forward slowly. The ghosts’ faces turn with them, the rest of their bodies perfectly still but for the slightest refracting light at the edges of their forms. Dean dashes into the corridor first, arms straight and gun out, and in the distance they see the slap of small bare feet against the earth bright against the glare of the flashlight. Another child, a little boy naked to the waist, skids to a halt and pivots without seeming to move a muscle and raises his arm into the darkness.

They follow where he points and each time there is a choice, an uncertain path, there is a spirit waiting for them with one hand outstretched, showing them what they hope is the way to Quintana’s tomb. As they run, exhaustion momentarily forgotten, something grows beneath their feet. It is a sound that Sam hears inside his own head first, then in his teeth but he doesn’t realize what it is until the ground _ripples_ beneath them and sends both of them to their knees, Dean’s flashlight clattering out of his hand.  
  
“It’s a fucking earthquake!” Sam gasps.

Dean’s head snaps towards him, his expression nearly invisible but for the light thrown back from Sam’s flashlight. “ _What?_ What the fuck do we do?”

“I don’t know - there weren’t any when I was at Stanford, only the little ones that you can’t even feel,” Sam says, getting shakily to his feet. “This doesn’t feel right, Dean -”

“No shit, it’s a friggin’ earthquake!” His brother’s voice is definitely panicked this time, the flat incomprehension of a man who has never lived in an earthquake state for more than a week or two at a time.

“No, I mean -” Another tremor throws Dean back onto the ground and Sam can hear him swearing. Sam holds his own feet with barely more than the will to stay upright and grits the rest of the sentence out between his teeth. “I mean, it doesn’t feel natural - it feels like there’s something controlling this. There’s something trying to keep us away from Quintana’s grave.”

“Fucking _great_!” Dean shouts. He slams the flat of his hand against the ground and then scrambles up as soon as there is a respite. “Let’s get this over with before the place comes down on our heads.”

It’s almost anticlimactic when they find Quintana’s tomb. They skid around a corner and it’s nearly blocking their path. Sam barrels into it at belly-height and Dean laughs at him even as they set the crowbars at either end of the stone cover and heave. Sam can feel eyes on them, the eyes of whatever set the earthquake in their path as well as the eyes of the Mission’s victims. The Indians gather at their shoulders and crowd the narrow corridor as Dean and Sam sweat and grunt and murmur insults and incentives together and finally, finally shift the heavy stone away.

It’s just a grave, like all of the hundreds that they’ve seen and desecrated in their lives. Quintana is little more than dust, brittle bones crossed over themselves, the faintest scraps of fabric still clinging to what had been his shoulders.

“You have been _way_ more trouble than you’re worth, padre,” Dean says as he uncaps the gas can. They watch him burn with grim expressions. The blue flame burns away the darkness around them and rarely has Sam ever been so glad to see his brother’s face. Dean glances up at him and smirks and for a long moment they simply grin at each other, elated that the job is done.

Sam is on his face in the dirt before either of them even register the earthquake. Dean shouts his name and then there are rocks raining down onto their heads and the very earth is churning. Their flashlights are on the ground. All that Sam can see is dust and his brother crawling towards him. There are Indians all around them, so close that their feet brush against Sam’s sleeve and they raise their arms in unison and open their mouths wide.

There is no word for the sound that they make.

Sam scrambles to cover his ears, teeth bared against the noise. Dean crouches over him, one hand curled over his own head and the other placed protectively around Sam’s back. He thinks that Dean is screaming something but it’s impossible to hear over the roar of earth and for a wild moment Sam wants to reach up and grab Dean by the back of his neck and haul him close until he can hear. He would be ok if his brother’s voice was the last thing he ever heard.

The spirits’ mouths widen until they are caricatures of the human beings that they used to be, sucking the darkness into themselves until finally, finally Sam realizes that he can see again. That there are still flames licking the sides of Quintana’s tomb.

That the earthquake has stopped.

The spirits turn their faces down to Sam and Dean, silent. They are losing shape and solidity, their faces still empty but changed somehow. Dean’s fingers grip Sam’s arm painfully. He is staring up into the faces of their saviors, his jaw tight. Sam passes him the flashlight and they help each other to stand. Dean’s fingers are shaking and he keeps one hand wrapped around Sam’s bicep as they pass through the spirits. There’s something in the corner of Sam’s vision that he can almost focus on, something green and curvy and it almost looks like a girl with brown hair, but it’s gone before Sam can do more than turn his head to look.

Whatever kept them lost in Holy Cross’ catacombs seems to have died with Quintana’s spirit. It’s barely fifteen minutes before they see light from the storage room below the church spilling down the staircase. There is nothing out of place, not even a single goddamn box spilled over and they mount the stairs to the church proper with wary relief. _We could have_ died _down there_ , Sam thinks, but doesn’t say anything.

Outside, they discover that it isn’t even dawn yet. There is the hint of it on the opposite side of the horizon from the ocean but the sky is still a miserable lingering grey. They hobble across the park to the Impala and sit gingerly on the hood. Dean digs a packet of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket.

“When did you start smoking?” Sam asks in disbelief.

“When did you start being a whiny bitch?” Dean asks in reply, and then adds as an afterthought: “Oh, it was when you were born.”

On the edge of the square, there is a girl watching them. She has on a green jacket that’s much too thick for the summer weather, bell bottoms, and long brown hair parted down the middle. They don’t see her until they’re inside the Impala, pulling slowly away from the curb, when Sam glances up to see her sitting on the steps of the church, and knows that it was her that he had seen in the catacombs.

 

  
  


 

Staircases have rarely looked so intimidating to Sam and Dean. The sun rises as they make their way to Capitola-by-the-Sea, rolling down the cliffs above the village in utter silence. Dean curses Sam’s choice of their third floor motel room up every step he drags himself.

“Give me Nebraska,” he gasps. “Give me Illinois. Give me Kentucky, ferchrissake. Anywhere that isn’t a goddamn hill or mountain and all the motels are on the ground like they’re supposed to be.”

Sam’s laugh is breathless, nearly a gasp. “You don’t get a view like this in Illinois.”

“Hey, I happen to _like_ cornfields,” Dean says.

He collapses on the closest bed as soon as they’re inside, the door locked behind them and blessed before Sam feels comfortable trying to shed his jacket. He gets one sleeve almost all the way off before Dean motions him over. “That’s seriously pathetic. Let me do it, dude.”

Dean herds Sam into the bathroom before pulling Sam’s t-shirt over his head. Seated on the toilet, Sam watches his brother’s face in the mirror as Dean examines his back. In the harsh light, the gash that cuts across the left side of Dean’s face looks nearly as bad as the one on Sam’s back: it leads from his temple down across the apple of his cheekbone and hooks upwards to end up close to his mouth. There’s dried blood smeared just about everywhere in their hair and clothing, worse than Chicago had been. Sam didn’t come out of the confrontation with Quintana so easily himself; he rests his forehead against the counter when Dean goes to get the first aid kit and nearly greys out again.

The clatter of the box on the counter brings Sam back to awareness. “Wake up, princess,” Dean says, holding up a suture kit. “Unless you want to do this yourself tomorrow.”

“Wait wait wait,” Sam says, holding up a feeble hand. “Half an hour ago, you couldn’t even see straight to drive. You think I’m gonna let you stick me with a needle while you’re like that?”

Dean shrugs, lips pursed. “Wouldn’t be the first time, but suit yourself.”

He turns away towards the mirror, digging out the rest of their suturing supplies. He ignores Sam’s hand but turns his head over his shoulder when Sam grabs his elbow. “Wait again,” Sam says slowly. “You’re not going to try and stitch yourself up, are you?”

Dean frowns at him. “Why not?”

Sam blinks, mouth open. “Because you have a _concussion_? Did you forget what I just said about not being able to drive thirty minutes ago? If I’m not going to let you stick needles in my back, what makes you think I’ll let you stick needles in your own face? It doesn’t even look all that deep, man.”  
  
Dean stares at himself in the mirror, brow furrowed as though he’s pondering the merits of what Sam is saying. He’s not reacting slowly enough that Sam can see the gears in his head turning, but it’s close. “Let me do it, Dean,” Sam says, exasperated. That earns him another frown, but Dean parks his butt on the counter without a word and waits for Sam to do something.

He keeps his eyes fixed on Sam’s face while Sam wets a hand towel through and dabs carefully at the dried blood. The slash reopens and begins to bleed again sluggishly. Dean blinks hard but doesn’t flinch away from Sam’s hands. “I don’t think you need stitches,” Sam murmurs when the wound is finally cleaned and swabbed with alcohol. “I can put some butterfly strips on it to keep the edges together and put a bandage on top to keep it clean.”

“Whatever,” Dean says faintly.

Up close, Dean smells awful, like soot and sweat and the oily stench of what they burned tonight. There’s mud smeared across his face and his eyes are so wide that he looks like nothing so much as a kid that’s been caught rolling around in the dirt and is being punished for it.

Sam’s attention is focused so completely on taping the gash closed that he misses seeing the deep discomfort in Dean’s eyes, the way that his mouth twitches as Sam’s fingers stray close to any hurt. When Sam pulls back to examine his handiwork, Dean swallows and hardens his face.

He holds his hands out parallel to the ground, palms facing downward. They’re perfectly steady and he raises his eyebrows at Sam. “Sit down on the goddamn toilet and let me take care of your back, Sammy. If that gets infected, it’ll be me who has to take care of your sorry ass.”

It takes a long time. Dean is nothing if not thorough, setting out what he needs in an orderly manner that Sam wouldn’t have credited him with. He pops a tablet of Panadol Rapid out of its box and Sam swallows it dry. The towel that Sam had used on Dean is filthy, so Dean grabs a new one. He curves one hand around the ball of Sam’s shoulder to keep Sam still while he works. Occasionally Sam can feel his thumb stroke over his skin, back and forth, comfortingly.

The Panadol is already working its way through Sam’s system when Dean tears open the suture pack with his teeth and carefully aligns the needle between the legs of the tweezers. “Hey, how’re you doing? That stuff kicking in yet or do you want me to see what’s in the minifridge out there?” he asks.

Sam shakes his head, woozy. “I’m good.” He wants to lean forward and rest on the counter again, or lean backwards and let Dean support him, so he settles for lolling his head to the side to rest against Dean’s forearm. “That ok?” he asks, closing his eyes.

He can feel Dean’s arms twitch just a little as Dean laughs. “Yeah. You’re fine.”

Quintana’s whip had cut deeply into Sam’s back, going crooked at his shoulder blade and continuing down across his spine to the middle of his ribs. Sam presses his face into the crook of Dean’s arm and breathes deeply. The curve of the suture needle feels more like pinches than anything else, any pain that there might be overshadowed by the Panadol and the warmth of Dean’s skin against his own.

“You’re good at this,” he mumbles.

Dean scoffs. “Of course I am. Had enough practice at it, haven’t I? I swear, I used to think that the only way I’d ever get Dad to a hospital was if something tore off a friggin’ limb.”

“You used to patch Dad up after hunts?”

Dean is silent for so long that Sam opens his eyes, looking into the mirror to see an unreadable expression on his brother’s face . “After a lot of things,” he says eventually.

“What do you mean?” Sam asks.

Dean glances up and sees Sam’s face in the mirror, watching him intently. His eyebrowse rise. “Don’t you remember?”

“No,” Sam says, and suddenly does: a flash of memory, barely more than the heavy scent of alcohol and the glint of a broken glass on the floor, Dean’s voice rough with impending puberty ordering him to _get back in your room, Sammy._

“Anyway, it wasn’t like there was anybody else to do it, was there?” Dean is saying, his attention back on the task at hand. “Caleb’s a good teacher, we never came across anything I couldn’t handle. All right, I think you’re good with the whole not bleeding to death thing.”

Sam stands and stretches, as best as he’s able. “Thank god,” he says, “I’m exhausted.” He staggers towards the door, but Dean’s voice stops him at the threshold.

“Sammy. You saw that girl outside the church, right? The one that looked like she stepped right off the corner of Haight and Ashbury or something?”

Sam nods. “Yeah, I saw her. She was in the catacombs with us. She didn’t exactly look ... contemporary with the rest of the spirits down there. There’s gotta be some sort of connection there, though. It’s just weird.”

Dean is silent for a long moment, staring at Sam. “What?” Sam says eventually, but Dean only shakes his head.

“Nothing. You really think there’s something bigger here? Something more than just Quintana’s ghost and whatever the hell was in the catacombs helping us?”

“That earthquake wasn’t natural,” Sam says firmly. “The rest of the church wasn’t even touched by it. It was only underground, where we were. Something was trying to stop us from getting to Quintana’s tomb.”

Dean nods, not looking at Sam. “Ok,” he says. “If you want to, we can stick around for a few more days, see what else we can dig up. All right?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Yeah, cool. Ok.”

“But,” Dean says sternly, holding up one finger, “we need at least a day of downtime, dude. I feel like I’m not gonna be able to walk for a week.”

“I’m not going anywhere near that one, man,” Sam laughs. “You keep your gay sexcapades to yourself, ok?”

He ducks out of the bathroom and shuts the door behind himself before Dean can respond. There is silence and then through the door, he hears the shower start up. The sunrise has turned their room into an ocean of pale light that shifts through the slats of the blinds and already the air is nearly stifling. All that Sam can manage is to slide his jeans off before collapsing face first onto the bed farthest from the window. He’s fast asleep before the growing daylight can begin to bother him, so it never occurs to him to look out the window, where hundreds of invisible hands press against the glass.

 

  



	2. Chapter 2

  


 

  
Sam wakes first to the smell of salt water and sage. The balcony door stands open and through it issues the call of sea gulls. Dean is nothing more than a shape buried beneath blankets as Sam works a pair of jeans up his legs and over his hips, buttons a shirt with slow, leaden movements. He doesn’t make a sound as Sam shuts the door quietly behind him.

He feels surprisingly well. The last shadow of painkillers still lingers in his mind, blurring his thoughts together into a comfortable fog of non-sequitors. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans as he trudges down a hill and over a short stone bridge in search of the coffeehouse he had noted the previous day. The sign in the second story window says _Mr. Toot’s_ and its interior is awash with sunlight.

A man with an enormous shock of frizzy red hair, tall enough to look down a little to meet Sam’s eyes, takes his order: one house coffee, a couple of pastries and one girly-as-hell-concoction that would guarantee Sam some brotherly torture, were Dean awake to see him drink it. Sam sips it at his leisure instead, propping his elbows on the railing of the bridge and watching the creek beneath him bleed out into the ocean.

His eyes flicker across the water but can’t seem to rest on anything in particular. He woke up feeling all right but his walk has done the exact opposite of what he had hoped. His fingers tap restlessly against the stone of the bridge and there’s a taste in the back of his mouth that not even the coffee can banish, like he’s bitten on tinfoil. He rubs a hand absently across his chest and tries to push the feeling away as he heads back towards the motel.

Dean stirs slightly when Sam opens the door with his shoulder, Dean’s coffee and their breakfast held in one hand. He breathes in deeply and lets it out in a long, thoughtful sigh, and Sam smiles to himself as he locks the door behind him and sets the pastry bag onto the table. Dean is slower in the morning these days, some part of his brain settled with the security of family sleeping close by. He’s no longer prone to reaching for the knife below his pillow if Sam happens to get up before he does, although Sam knows that he still keeps it there.

Sam sets the coffee cup down on the bedside table and sits down on his own bed, elbows resting on knees. Dean is an illusion of carelessly spread limbs, one hand snaked underneath his pillow like it’s unintentional, the other pressing against his eyes. He’s shirtless, a dingy motel towel crumpled beside him as though he hadn’t bothered to kick it off the bed before falling asleep. The sheets are rucked up around his bare legs. Even in the shadows, a smattering of freckles are just visible across the bridge of Dean’s nose that brings a smile to Sam’s face. Their mother had had freckles.

He leans forward to ruffle Dean’s hair and almost gets there before there is an iron grip around his wrist and green eyes are blinking warily at him. “Whafuck?” Dean mumbles, letting go of Sam to rub at his face. He tries again: “Dude, what the fuck? What’re you lookin’ at?”

Sam grins and leans forward with one finger extended that Dean goes cross-eyed trying to look at. “Are these ... _freckles_?” he says dramatically. “Are you _freckling_?”

Dean bats his hand away and rolls over onto his back, wincing, and then looks at Sam with deliberately casual eyes. “Why are you up already, anyway? You have another nightmare?”

Sam shakes his head and passes the coffee cup to Dean, who accepts it with a quick nod. “Nah, just ... couldn’t stay in bed anymore, you know? It’s nice out there.”

Dean glances towards the window, his eyebrows raised skeptically, but his expression is satisfied as he lowers the cup of coffee and sits up. There is a bruise at the bottom of his hairline and a cut on his mouth but he seems more focused than he had been the night before.

Dean’s eyes snap back to him. “I got a coffee mustache or something?”

Sam shakes his head. “You still look half-dead, man.”

Dean huffs at him and gets up to paw at the pastry bag. “So what do you think that girl was?” Dean asks, his neck bent over breakfast. He stuffs the apple turnover into his mouth and wanders back to hand the chocolate croissant to Sam.

Sam raises his eyebrows. “I thought we were taking the day off from hunting.”

“What, that means we can’t talk about things that go bump in the night?” Dean asks. He devours the turnover in seconds and is up again as soon as he’s flicked the crumbs from his fingers, pacing around the room looking for clean clothing. Sam eats his breakfast more slowly, his entire body still languid. He can feel stitches pulling every time he moves his shoulders, and digs into their bag to pop something a bit less powerful than the Panadol.

“Winchesters don’t take days off!” Dean bellows, his voice muffled slightly by the bathroom door.

“No, Winchesters don’t complain, bitch, whine or piss and moan,” Sam says, deepening his voice into a piss-poor imitation of their dad.

Dean’s response is nearly instantaneous: “You accomplish all of those every day, so I guess all bets are off, right?”

“Fuck you,” Sam calls, and Dean laughs.

Sam swallows a couple of pills dry and pulls out his other pair of jeans and a decently clean shirt. They’re overdue for laundry, especially now that they’ve only got a single pair of jeans apiece that aren’t covered in blood and dirt. There’s an itch in his palms that won’t go away no matter how hard he rubs them on his thighs and belatedly, he realizes it for what it is: their family’s brand of curiosity, that itch to be on the job, tracking down leads and killing whatever’s in their path.

That must have been what he had felt in the Village. Boredom, maybe; his brain so far asleep that it hadn’t even considered the easy solution. He was stupid to think that it’d been anything else, really.

“Hey,” he calls to Dean, who sticks his head out of the bathroom in response, toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. “That girl, she definitely wasn’t contemporary to the Ohlone. She looked like she died in the 70’s or something.”

Dean vanishes back into the bathroom and Sam hears him spit into the sink. “So what was she doing down with the Indians?” he says when he reemerges.

Sam shrugs. “Maybe she’s looking for help.”

Dean snorts, taking a second look inside the pastry bag to see if he’d miraculously missed something. “Yeah, a ghost that doesn’t want to kill anybody. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

 

 

Dean smirks at the back of Holy Cross church when they drive by it, the steeple just visible from the curve of the highway. He takes one hand off the wheel to lay an affectionate slap on the side of Sam’s skull, a sort of _well done, we rock movement_ that Sam has had long years of brotherly abuse to get used to. Dean puts on _Houses of the Holy_ and cranks the volume, his fingers tapping against the steering wheel.  
  
The day isn’t hot enough for the fog to come rolling in, but it’s close. The wind through the open windows blows Sam’s hair into his face.

“Roll up your damn window!” Sam shouts.

“Cut your damn hair!” Dean yells back cheerfully.

The Impala starts rocking side to side as they round the curve of Highway 1. Dean curses the road and the wind and anything else that isn’t a part of his baby and they nearly crash twice before they’re safe in the parking lot of a 7-11. Dean practically vaults out of the driver’s seat and kneels on the ground before his car without heed to the broken glass around him. Sam can hear him swearing through the open window and is curious but not overly concerned until something slams his head back against the seat.

“Shit!” Sam shouts.

Dean’s head pops up into view like a jack-in-the-box. “What?” he says. “What the hell’s wrong now?”

Sam stares up at the Impala’s ceiling, every nerve in his body crawling, and can’t explain.

Dean checks his baby inside and out and finds nothing wrong with it, but as soon as they’re back on the road, it begins again. The radio turns on suddenly and goes from one end of the dial to the other faster than human fingers can turn. The brakes go out at two stopsigns. From time to time, Sam can see flashes of the girl out of the corner of his eye. She’s thumbing on a streetcorner. She’s sitting behind them, smelling of incense and wet earth.

“Get the hell out of my car!” Dean shouts at the rearview mirror, as if that’s going to help.

They have enough of a respite to make it to downtown Santa Cruz, where they head for the Central Branch library. There’s a bewilderingly large section of the library devoted to local history, and it doesn’t take them long to find what they’re looking for.

“Hey, Sam,” Dean says, flinging out his hand to jab Sam in the side. Sam looks over, a little surprised; the last time he had looked over, Dean had been sitting with his hand propped on the ball of his hand, playing Solitaire. “All right, so, you remember that cheesy vampire movie with that blond guy in it, you know, Keifer whatever?”

“The Lost Boys. Dad never stopped bitching about the inaccuracies,” Sam murmurs.

“Like he ever does,” Dean snorts. “Anyway, it was set in a fictional town that was based on Santa Cruz, inspired by this huge string of murders that happened in the early 70’s. All during February, 1973, the bodies of two college students were discovered in the woods, their bodies in pieces, a 79-year-old woman was found raped and strangled in the bath and the bodies of six other victims were found. There was a serial rapist around and it didn’t even stop there. From 1970 to 1973, three people axed at least twenty-six people between them. That’s why this place was called the ‘Murder Capital of the World.’”

“Wow,” Sam says. “Any records of strange weather, planet alignment during that time?”

Dean shrugs. “Some half-baked scientist said that an earthquake big enough to sink California into the sea was imminent or something, but nobody really seemed to care except this one guy who thought it was a good enough reason to kill thirteen people. I’ll try to find tidal charts or something. You check weather or whatever.”

An hour and a half later, Sam slaps his hand down next to where Dean has fallen asleep, his head pillowed on almanacs. “Nothing,” he says sourly. “No freaky weather, no political upheavals, plenty of missing person reports but none that match our ghost. You manage to find anything interesting before you totally gave up and passed out, jerk?”

“Nope,” Dean says, rubbing a hand over his face. “Nothing at all except for a month that nine people were murdered, which is what, one more interesting thing than you found? Shut your pie hole.”

“So what could it be?” Sam asks as they leave the library. Dean squints into the sun and doesn’t look at him as they make their way towards the parking garage where they left the car. “There’ve been too many deaths and incidents to chalk it up to a single force, whether it’s ... a spirit or an elemental or even just the 70’s being a crappy time to move here.”

“You said that the Psycho house or whatever hosted Satanists, right?” Dean asks.

“Yeah, it’s a retirement home now.”

“So what if some dumbass Satanists opened a gateway back in the day and never managed to close it?”

“I dunno,” Sam says doubtfully. “Wouldn’t the attacks come more regularly? Wouldn’t people keep getting killed in the same way? It’s been going on for an awfully long time for nobody to have ntoiced anything, especially in a town like this.”

“People might be getting killed in different ways because there’re different spirits loose in the area,” Dean counters. They’ve reached the Impala and Dean stands with one hand spread flat on her hood, as if contact with his car will help him convince Sam. “We’ve already _seen_ different spirits fucking around -- it could be a ripple effect, like, somebody gets killed by one of the Satanist’s spirits and becomes a spirit themselves who kills other people.”

Dean’s grinning at Sam as though he’s just talked a pair of twins into a threesome, but Sam only shakes his head. “Sunshine Villa was only built in the 1860’s or so, and there was a family living in it back then. Father Quintana outdates the house by fifty years and the Satanists probably weren’t living there until the 1960’s.”

Dean sighs, his fingers moving restlessly over the car. Sam shoves his hands in his pockets and waits. Finally, Dean sighs. “This town sucks out loud,” he says, and Sam almost wants to smack him except for the fact that he’s starting to agree.

“Why do you keep saying that?” he asks instead. Dean’s eyes flick towards him, puzzled.

“What?”

Sam folds his arms on the top of his car and rests his chin on top of his hands. “You keep saying that,” he says slowly. “Santa Cruz sucks. California sucks. I _get it_ , Dean. Shut the hell up and find a new topic of conversation already, ok? Or at least tell me _why_ California sucks so hard that you need to mention it once every five goddamn minutes. I’ve been trying to figure it out but all I see is sunshine, sand and hippies. I’d chalk it up to hippies except that Napa didn’t have any and you were _still_ being an asshole there, so _what is it_?”

“It is the hippies,” Dean says, grinning. “I could smell ‘em from Napa. The entire state smells like patchouli and body odor. Who wouldn’t love it? Well, other than me, but I’m sorta allergic to that extra stench of self-righteousness.”

“Dean,” Sam says warningly, but Dean is already unlocking the Impala’s door, head down, a chuckle rising in his throat that cuts off abruptly when he opens the door. He staggers away from the car and Sam is about to ask him what’s wrong when the smell hits him too.

“Jesus!” Dean yells. Sam can hear him on the other side of the car, cursing wildly, but all of his attention seems to have been diverted into not puking in the parking lot that they’re standing in.

It’s muddy earth and congealed blood and lower intestines torn open and rotting in the sun. It’s the smell of a body that lays underneath shady trees for months with nothing larger than racoons around to tear it, spoiled meat in a still forest.

“Jesus,” Dean says again, awed. Sam tries to lift his head from the pavement and gags again. He can hear Dean shifting suddenly, his posture stiffening. “Wait a fucking minute,” Dean says slowly, possibilities dawning in his mind. “You think that shit’s gonna stick to my car?”

Laughing only brings the stench into his mouth and lungs, so Sam waits until he’s hauled himself to his feet and gotten a few yards away. From a safe distance, he watches Dean dart back and forth, his shirt sleeve pulled over his hand and covering his nose.

“Maybe she was killed hitchhiking,” Sam says, “and that’s why she’s able to mess with your car.”

“Wish she’d quit it already,” Dean grumbles. “This is worse than when you drove my car into a freaking house.” He squints spectulatively into the car. “What do you want?”

“Can you see her in there?” Sam gasps.

Dean shakes his head. “It’s just the smell, dude.”

He comes round the car and stands next to Sam. They stare at the Impala appraisingly. “She must really wanna tell us something,” Sam says.

Dean doesn’t dignify that with a direct reply. “Heads or tails?”

“What?” Sam asks, bewildered.

“Someone has to go in and tell her to get her ass out of my car before that smell becomes permanent. By the way, if it does, I’m making you clean the interior with a _toothbrush_ until it’s nothing but a memory.”

Sam calls it in the air. Dean catches it one handed and flips it to his other hand. Peeks. Smirks. Sam sighs and trudges back to the car.

The driver’s side door is open and the worst of it seems to have dissapated in the breeze. He can hear Dean cackling behind him as he strips his outer shirt off and ties it around his nose and mouth, bandit-style. It doesn’t help much. He doesn’t look behind him as he slides into the passenger seat, breathing shallowly. He can hear the creak of leather beneath her as she slides forward along the seat. The hands that come up and rest to either side of his shoulders are bloody, fingers twisted and useless, the faintest bit of green polish still clinging to the nails.

Sometimes, Sam almost forgets how much he actually hates being touched by spirits. It doesn’t happen often; most of them are only solid enough to kill you, and they don’t usually get close enough to touch. There was a ghost in Nebraska that knocked Sam to the ground and stretched out on top of him before Dad could knock it off, and the memory of that not-skin against his own gave him a complex about raw chicken for years.

Her fingers slide along the seat rest and Sam can imagine them catching and digging into the soft skin of his throat.

The stench of her is so much worse up close.

Her mouth brushes his ear and somehow, Sam manages not to flinch away. “Eden,” she whispers. “The Garden of Eden.”

 

  
  


 

Dean makes Sam crank the windows all the way down before he’ll get near the car, and he drives with a pinched expression. “The Garden of Eden,” he repeats. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Got me,” Sam mutters. He presses his nose against the inside of his wrist the way their Dad taught them, blocking out the rot of the grave with the scent of their own skin. His eyes are closed, his attention focused so completely on clearing his nasal passages that he doesn’t realize that the Impala is stopped until its engine is ticking contentedly in the sun. Dean’s staring expectantly at him.

“Hop to it, Sammy,” he says, and that’s when Sam finally glances around and sees that they’re sitting in the lot of a do-it-yourself car wash. Dean is grinning at him when Sam looks back to his brother.

“You are such a dick,” Sam says with as much loathing as he can muster. Dean only laughs.

“Hurry up. I want her clean before that bitch comes back and stinks it up again.”

“You can barely even smell it anymore,” Sam grumbles, but he heaves himself out of the car anyway and goes to find an attendant.

Dean, for his part, swings his legs out of the car and plants his elbows on his knees, enjoying the prospect of getting Sammy to wash the Impala with what looked like a minimum amount of bitching and a maximum amount of guilt. Cause and effect: _you wanted to check this thing out, now my car smells like dirty vag._ Sam was right and Dean knew it; when the girl had delivered her stupid, cryptic message (and what the hell was with that, anyway? Did dying just make it impossible for people to just say what they wanted?), she had vanished and taken that awful stink with her, thank Christ.

The prospect of a wash was just too much to resist.

Dean’s back pops when he gets out of the car. The fog that hit them at the beach is just now making its lazy way into town, clinging to the cracked aslphalt and brushing over the cars that rush by them, trying to beat the trafflic light half a block down. Across the street, tanned teenagers pass by on bicycles, surfboards clenched precariously under their arms. On the corner, a person of indistinguishable gender begs for spare change.

Dean surveys all he sees and is unimpressed.

He’s not fond of college towns, not fond of large-ish cities. The rules that they live by don’t always apply; who to go to, to ask questions, to hear about the local lore. Everyone on the street looks homeless to him and he doubts that the punks at the head shops and tattoo parlors would be able to tell him what he needs to know.

He’s been to Santa Cruz before. Sam didn’t ask how he knew to find the only motel in Capitola that would charge them less than 200$ a night, didn’t think to ask, but when Sam’d been at Stanford for about three months or so, Dean and his Dad spent nearly a week holed up in the Harbor Lights Motel. It had been the only time they’d come to California together and they’d lasted for only a few hours in Palo Alto before heading over the hill and losing themselves in their respective intoxicants. Dad’s had come in bottles, Dean’s came in skirts, and he had spent Christmas Eve with two girls and half an ounce of shrooms between them. Christmas Day he and Dad had dried out at the Beach Boardwalk, listlessly flicking cigarette ashes onto filthy sand, before Dad had passed him a printout from a daily rag in Oklahoma, front page full of missing children.

He’d gone back by himself since then, of course, to check on Sammy, make sure he still had all his limbs or whatever, but never again with Dad. It had been a failed experiment and they hadn’t spoken of it afterwards, even when Dean was pretty sure that Dad was making his own trips to central California.

Sam comes back full of attitude and practically pushes Dean away from the car. He gives Dean one last bitchface before driving the car up to one of the service stations, but Dean’s lost interest in Sam doing menial labor, his brain busy turning the ghost’s message over and around.

Fucking cryptic ghosts.

He scans the street as he walks, checking both sides for possibilities. There are a lot of people out but everyone seems to be in motion: on bicycles, in cars, walking quickly down the street without making eye contact. Not a bad policy. Diner, car insurance store, head shop, skate shop, head shop. The next time Sammy has an urge to ‘stay and investigate,’ he’s goddamn going to do it on his own. Dean’s almost ready to turn back and tell Sammy that his goddamn Californian ghosts can eat his asshole - they’re hitting the interstate and not stopping until there’s three thousand miles of cornfields in either direction - when he sees the barn.

At the end of a long parking lot is an enormous metal barn with people bustling in and out of it, their arms full of dubious looking thrift store finds. There are two kids that look about Sam’s age standing at one corner of the lot giving every impression of a disdainful eye in a hurricane, passing a joint back and forth between them.

“Hey, hippie!” Dean calls.  
  
Their heads swivel towards him. The bearded one curls a lip at him. “What, you need directions to your Abercrombie & Fitch photoshoot?”

Dean checks himself about fifteen feet away, resisting the urge to look down at his well-worn flannels, salvaged from St. Vincent De Paul over a year ago. “Actually,” he replies, “I was hoping you guys could direct me to the unemployment line, since it looks like you just came from there.”

Silence stretches tightly and if Sam had been there, he might have laughed nervously and made some lame comment to cover for Dean’s big mouth. Dean, unchecked, lifts his chin and stands his ground.

There is the slightest twitch of an appreciative smirk, mostly hidden in the heavy shadow of the guy’s beard, and then he holds the joint out towards Dean, who accepts it gracefully and takes a long drag.  
  
He coughs a little as he passes it back, and the hippies beam proudly. Stoner’s equivalent of thanking the chef, Dean supposes.

“That’s outdoor organic, man,” says the other. “Grown right here in the mountains.”

“You grow it yourself?”  
  
They shake their heads regretfully. The conversation is interrupted by a shout of “Jimmy Mack!” from behind him. The bearded guy, apparently Jimmy Mack, turns. A hunchbacked man with long, scraggly hair is waving at him cheerfully. “Jimmy Mack, this lady needs a price on this keyboard.”

“I’ll be off my break in just a minute,” Jimmy Mack hollers back. Dean is momentarily distracted by the possibility that normal names are simply outlawed in Santa Cruz when their attention returns to him. “The barn’s gonna close at two, but we reopen at three if you want to wait around.”

“Actually,” Dean says, and nods his thanks as the joint makes its way into his hand again, “I need directions. The Garden of Eden mean anything to either of you?”

They nod nearly in unison. There’s a symbiosis to their movements, a sort of back and forth of unspoken communication that makes Dean wonder if they’re brothers. It would be eerie if it wasn’t so familiar, and Dean relaxes into it unconsciously. “Yeah, of course,” Jimmy Mack says. “That’s an awesome hiking spot. It’s up on Highway 9, past Henry Cowell Park. You can get to it real easy from here, actually.”

“There’s been a lot more tourists out there lately,” the other guy chimes in, “but you can still find some nice spots along the river.” They share a disgusted look between them, presumably at the thought of tourists tramping along the river rather than cluttering up the beaches as usual. Dean remembers that sort of disdain as well; the girls on Christmas Eve had been full of contempt for anyone living on the other side of the Santa Cruz mountains.

Jimmy Mack is drawing Dean a map by the time the Impala pulls into the parking lot, Sam’s face peering out the window like somebody’s disapproving grandmother. The car gleams and Dean feels a surge of affection for his brother that probably has more to do with what he’s smoking than he’d like to admit.

“Thanks a lot, man,” he says, they shag ass towards the highway.

Sammy’s got his bitch-face on but doesn’t say anything until they’re winding their way back up the mountains, trees thicker and greener than on Highway 17. There’s an abnormal amount of people walking on the side of the highway, flannel-wearing, bearded mountain people. Sam’s lips thin as he slows to avoid them.

“What the fuck, Dean,” he spits at last. “You have no idea what could be waiting for us up there.”

“Relax, Sammy. I didn’t inhale,” Dean drawls, and then bursts into giggles, proving himself a liar.

“Yeah,” Sam says bitterly. “What do you think Dad would say if he saw you going hunting stoned?”  
  
“He’d tell you to quit being a whiny bitch,” Dean says, as annoyed as he could possibly be, which isn’t much. Santa Cruz organic gives one hell of a body high, apparently, and he grins contentedly out the window at nothing. “I think I can handle a little grave digging.”

Sam is silent for a long time. When he finally speaks, it’s quiet, logical. “Seriously, Dean. Maybe we should hold off on this. At least for a few hours. Wait for you to get your head straight.”

Dean is sidetracked by a train of thought comparing being stoned to drunk driving, trying to figure out how often he’s driven them home from a bar and not heard a friggin’ peep out of Sam, and why does Sammy have to be such a whiny bitch, anyway, when he remembers that he’s forgotten to respond to his brother.

“I’m fine, dude. Seriously. Let’s just get this done and get the hell out of this state,” he says, his eyes sliding closed too easily, head dropping back against the leather seat. He almost keeps his mouth closed around the thought that slides out next, tacked onto the end as an afterthought. “Before you remember how much you liked it here and decide to stay.”

Sam, wisely, doesn’t answer.

 

  
  


 

Dean is nearly dozing by the time they hit Felton, but he snaps awake as they pass by the green metal gate Jimmy Mack told them would take them to the Garden of Eden. “Sammy,” he says, floundering back towards consciousness. “Sam, you missed it, turn around.”

“It isn’t there,” Sam says. There’s something in his voice that makes Dean turn and look at his brother, something wound so tight that it shakes the timbre of Sam’s words. His long fingers are gripping the steering wheel so hard that the knuckles are white but Sam’s eyes are glazed and shiny, as though he had been the one toking.

“It isn’t?” Dean asks slowly.

Sam shakes his head. It’s barely more than a spastic movement. “It’s a little further up. Not much. Just a little.”

There’s a turn-off on the road that loops behind a thick redwood tree, a narrow roadway for cars to turn around in. Sam pulls the Impala into this space and parks, his jaw working.

“What’s wrong?” Dean asks, his voice low. “Sam? What’s going on?”

It’s an effort for Sam to turn his head. He shakes his head again; he doesn’t have the words for it. “There’s - something out there,” he manages. “I can feel it. I think I’ve been feeling it since we got here.”

“What is it?” Dean asks, but Sam doesn’t know. There’s nothing to describe what’s pulling his mind apart, weaving it into the air around them until Sam could feel the very ground breathe beneath the Impala’s tires. He climbs out of the car and Dean follows, keeping a wary eye. “You gonna be ok to do this?” he asks as Sam digs supplies out of the trunk.

Sam lifts an eyebrow at him. “Are _you_ gonna be ok to do this?” he asks pointedly.

In truth, things feel more or less like he’s the star in some video game. Dean’s hazy enough to be enjoying more than just the feeling of being on the hunt again, clear enough that he knows what’s going on, what needs to be done and - vaguely - what’s expected of him.

Dean finds it first, just the merest hint of a ripple in the clovers that blanket the red earth. Sam leads the way into the trees, pulled forward by whatever was leading him on. They see flashes of the girl in the trees, liberated from the Impala and following them to her final resting place. She doesn’t come close. Slowly, the noise from the road falls away until all they can hear is their own footsteps and the rushing of water, somewhere out of sight.

The trail narrows and takes them up a steep hill, climbing over fallen tree trunks and sliding carefully down the other side. Dean’s brief moment of sobriety has been chased away by the scattering of sunlight across his face and he’s actually sort of starting to maybe think that Santa Cruz isn’t so bad. Sam only glares at him when he mentions it, though.

“So,” Dean says after a while, “You, uh, you having any premonitions or anything? Visions? Anything like that?”

“No,” Sam replies without turning around. “Nothing. I just feel - stretched, somehow.”  
  
“Stretched,” Dean repeats. “Sammy the Psychic Wonder. When are your super powers ever gonna do anything useful? They always gotta be so friggin’ vague?”

“I don’t know,” Sam mutters.

They both feel it when they step into the clearing. It’s soaked with sun, leather ferns growing nearly up to their waists. Beautiful but wrong, somehow diseased and discolored behind their eyes, like the afterimage of the sun. Dean blinks hard and goes to shield his eyes before he realizes that it isn’t something that he’s actually seeing.

“Hey, check it out,” he says. “Your girlfriend’s back.”

Their ghost stands not thirty yards away from them. It’s the clearest view that they’ve had of her yet: tiny, bloodied, her intestines dangling out of her bared belly, dirt smeared across her face and hands. Ghosts aren’t often very expressive unless they’re trying to kill you and Dean isn’t all that surprised when all she does is stare at them for a bit and then fade out of view.

“I think that’s where her body is,” Sam says.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” is Dean’s reply, and he takes the lead.

The girl’s final resting place turns out to be nothing more than a small depression sinking below the level plain of the clearing, the earth claiming her body. The first few shovelfuls of dirt turn up the ragged corner of a polyester jacket and they share a long look before turning back to the work.

Or, at least, before Sam turns back towards the work; Dean seems frozen, testing the air as though he’s a dog. “I’m not digging this by myself,” Sam says without glancing up. He tenses when Dean shushes him, and nearly drops his shovel when Dean’s hand clenches around the back of his neck.

“Do you smell that?” Dean says softly.

Sam sniffs and smells nothing. He looks at Dean expectantly.

“ _Barbeque_ ,” Dean says at last.

Sam lets out an irritated sigh. “Jesus, Dean, really? Now is not the time to have the munchies. We can stop for something when we’re done with this.”

This time, when Dean’s hand comes down against Sam’s neck it’s more of a slap than a protective gesture. “Jackass,” he hisses. “If there’s a house close enough that we can smell them cooking, then there’s a house that’s close enough that they would’ve been able to smell a body.”

Sam stills, still bent over his shovel, his chin lifted. He can smell the barbeque now, sweet on the wind. “Maybe it’s a house that was built after she was killed here,” he ventures.

Dean shakes his head. “You see _any_ new houses on the way up here? You finish this, I’m gonna go check it out.”

He pulls the shotgun out of their duffel before heading off, and Sam watches him disappear between the trees before he puts the shovel to earth again.

Sam can admit that he’s probably in far worse shape than Dean is, intoxicants or no, even if he’s only admitting it to himself. He’s dizzy, clumsy in his movements as he lays white bones bare in the sun. The movements are familiar and soothing: lifting the heavy shovel, careful to avoid scattering the remains, tossing the dirt away. He’s dug hundreds of graves, with his dad and brother and sometimes even by himself, and it narrows his focus into nothing but the pull of muscles in his back and the sun against his skin.

He hears the whistle of the club as it comes down. It’s enough time to turn slightly but not enough to dodge, and then everything goes black.

 

  
  


 

The house is old and shingled, a faded red. Dean approaches from the back, shotgun ready. The smell of the barbeque is tantalizing and Dean realizes that they haven’t eaten since the Mexican food this morning, which already seems like days ago. He can hear The Mamas and the Papas playing from somewhere inside the house, quiet and eerie, another ironic soundtrack for their lives.

He eases the kitchen door open; he can see an ancient station wagon parked out front but can’t see anything moving inside. The kitchen is clean enough. Yellow plaid decorations that look older than the station wagon, clean dishes stacked next to the sink, two cups inside it. A stack of mail on the kitchen table addressed to _Addison Newell_ , and Dean nods to himself in smug certainty: not a normal name in this entire county. Dean heads right into a panelled living room, sticking closely to the wall as he whips quickly around it, gun up and ready - and then stops when he gets a good look what’s on the walls.

He reaches out to touch it before he can stop himself, fingers ghosting over the edges of the endless spirals gouged out of the wall. The wood is a deep reddish brown where it’s been hacked into and the color spills out unevenly over the sides. He backs up a couple steps to see it fully, every sense straining for movement or sound.

There’s a _mouth_ on the wall. It’s almost perfectly spherical, no evidence of teeth or tongue, and something about it sends an icy shiver down his spine. Scattered on the floor are similar drawings of an enormous hole (mouth, it’s a _mouth_ ), smeared with something that Dean really doesn’t want to touch.

There’s a sound from the other side of the kitchen and Dean turns, immediately alert. He can see the smoke from the barbeque pit through the sliding glass doors and there, on the edge of the door - a bare foot, the faintest bit of green polish still clinging to the nails.

She looks barely eighteen, naked, pale body criss-crossed with ropes that had long since cut deeply into bare flesh. She isn’t conscious but drowsing close to it, moving her head aimlessly. Alone, as far as Dean can tell, left sitting a few feet away from the barbeque like the world’s most unwilling dinner guest. His knife is out of his pocket before his knees hit the ground, sawing quickly through her bindings, eyes moving constantly around in case whoever did this to her is coming back.

She begins to cry as she swims towards awareness, her fingers weakly scrabbling back along the arms of the chair and Dean speaks in soft, comforting words: _you’re gonna be ok, everything’s gonna be all right, I’m here to help, who did this to you?_ He strips off his outer shirt as soon as she’s more or less free and wraps it around her shoulders, covering the long slash that runs all the way down her sternum and crosses at her breasts.

“Come on, honey, I’m gettin’ you out of here,” he says.

There’s a laundry basket in the small room off the kitchen, full of clean clothing, and he helps her into a pair of sweat pants at least a foot too long for her, kneels down again and rolls them up until she can walk well enough to lean on him. He doesn’t want to stay long enough to find her clothes and she offers no help as to their location. She moves when he moves her but staggers as soon as his arm isn’t around her shoulders. She says her name is Mandy.

He thumbs open his phone as soon as they’re clear of the house. There was a pair of flip flops bigger than even Sam could wear lying next to the door and Mandy stumbles a bit in them. She’s crying almost constantly, little gulping sobs that almost distract Dean from the fact that Sam is _not picking up his phone._

It rings and rings and Mandy has suddenly become one hell of a complication. Dean isn’t panicking, but it’s close.

Thank god there’s a spare set of keys hidden snugly in the well of the right back tire. He carries Mandy for part of the way back, after she sags against him and nothing he says will coax her to go just a little bit further. She can’t tell him how she got there or what happened to her and after he tries Sam’s phone again, it’s starting to matter less and less. He puts her in the back seat and takes her carefully by the shoulders.

“Mandy,” he says softly, his tone commanding her attention. “Mandy. I have to go back for something, ok? You’re going to be absolutely safe right here. Will you wait right here for me? You can lock the doors behind me and no one is going to come after you. I’ll be back as soon as I can and we’ll take you somewhere safe, far away from here.”

Every nerve in his body is screaming for Sammy, _you’ve left Sam in the woods with a serial killer,_ but he forces himself to stay still when she grabs his forearms. “I’m not leaving you.” Voice still soothing and she relaxes just slightly, enough for him to free one of his hands and push her long hair away from her face. “My brother is still back there and I need to make sure he’s ok before we can take you some place safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can. You think you’ll be ok?”

Mercifully, she nods, but her face looks so naked and scared that Dean mentally downgrades her age to maybe sixteen. “You’re safe here,” he says again. “I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”

For a long moment she only stares at him, her eyes searching his face. Then, finally, she whispers, “Thank you, Dean,” and if Dean’s brain hadn’t already been dissolving into panic, he might have realized that he’d never told Mandy his name.

 

  
  


 

The cellphone brings Sam back to consciousness, the trilling grating in his pocket before there’s a fumbling hand reaching into his pocket and drawing the phone out, flinging it carelessly away. It rings and rings, muffled by the distance and the underbrush and then it stops, and the hand returns and grabs Sam by the ankles to drag him along. His hands are tied securely, wrists crossed over his stomach, rope winding all the way up his elbows. The earth tugs at the stitches running across his shoulder blades and he can’t quite stifle the gasp that rises to his lips.

The man who drags him glances over his shoulder and smiles almost comfortingly. Even flat on his back, Sam can tell that he’s the tallest living person he’s ever seen, one massive hand clenched tightly enough around both of Sam’s ankles that he wouldn’t be able to break free even if his legs weren’t tied together as well. He’s old enough to be Sam’s dad, his hair shot through with gray, face creased into a smile that would almost have made Sam less afraid if the man hadn’t spoken then.

“It won’t hurt much, I promise. It’ll be over before you know it.”

“What are you going to do to me?” Sam grits out between his teeth.

The man doesn’t turn his head again but he laughs quietly, sadly. “Nothing that you don’t want,” he says, as though he’s still trying to reassure Sam. “I heard you all the way from my house, singing the death song right back at me. There’s usually only one at a time but this is good, this is wonderful. You’ve helped me out a lot, kid I’m really grateful.”

“What do you mean, death song?” His head goes hard over the gnarly root of a redwood tree and Sam winces. He watches the way the man moves, the heavy stoop of his shoulders, looking for an opportunity to fight back. The man doesn’t reply.

The forest isn’t nearly so lovely when his back is grinding over every part of it, his legs up in the air. Sam tries again. “You killed that girl back there, didn’t you?” he accuses. “The one in the ground.”

The man’s voice is disapproving. “She was resting quietly.”

Sam has to laugh at that, thinking of his brother. “No she wasn’t. She was haunting me. That’s how I found her grave.” He almost stumbles over us and turns it to me at the last second. If the man hadn’t caught Dean making a beeline for his barbeque, Sam’s depending on him for rescue and the last thing he wants to do is alert this guy that help could be on the way.

The man only makes a satisfied noise, as if he’s had something confirmed. “Rest easy,” he says. “We’re almost there.”

‘There’ turns out to be a flat rock, nearly long enough for Sam to stretch out on, if he’s willing to let his feet dangle a bit. It’s stained with blood and the earth around the base is as bare as if it’d been scorched. The man lifts him almost carefully, one hand wrapped around the ropes on Sam’s arms, the other cradling his skull. Sam’s back scrapes against the rock nonetheless and he’s settled into exactly the position he had imagined, head against the top, his body hanging off the edge just above his knees, his feet barely touching the ground.

He isn’t afraid when the man brings the knife out, his gaze never wavering from the weapon. Dean has saved him so many times that Sam’s faith is instinctual. His only priorities are stalling for time and getting as much information as he can.

“You’ve been doing this for a long time, haven’t you?” he asks as the man begins to cut away Sam’s shirt, right down the middle of his chest. “You said they usually come one at a time. How many have there been?”

The man shrugs. It’s a graceless gesture on his bulky frame. “I’ve lost count. It’s been a long while.”

“What, thirty, forty years?” Sam asks. His casual tone is borrowed from Dean. “It’s been at least that long, if that girl’s clothes are anything to go by.”

The man’s face darkens and the hand holding the knife trembles, just a bit. His hand is spread flat across Sam’s chest, holding him in place and dashing any hopes that Sam is still cherishing about being able to break away. “She was in ‘73.”

Something sparks in Sam’s brain, some dim connection that starts with Dean telling him to shut the hell up and ends with nine people murdered in a single month, and his mouth opens without concern for the point of the knife held over his heart. “February of ‘73, right?”

The man’s smile is a grimace and the knife presses downwards, shifting up a few inches to just underneath the little dip of his collarbone, running over a single curve of rib until it hits his sternum. The hand not holding the knife twists Sam’s arms above his head without ceasing the downward movement of the other hand. “You’re good,” the man says, his voice rising so that Sam can hear him over his own labored breathing. “She got away. She was one of my first and I -” He breaks off with a muffled laugh, his mouth twisting. “I used to tell all of them how sorry I was, how I didn’t want to be hurting them, but no one ever believed me. Guess I can’t really blame them, huh?”

The man’s brows knit together and for an instant Sam can see deep exhaustion in every crease of the man’s face, true regret and loathing as he drags the knife down, cutting just a little bit deeper into the soft flesh of Sam’s stomach.

“Anyway,” the man continues, “I’ve never let it happen again. I learned my lesson then and I’ve stuck with it all this time, no matter how anyone’s begged or how much I wanted to let them go. I wish it could go better for you, kid. You seem like you’re pretty smart. I’ll try and make it easy on you.” He smiles down at Sam. “The girl’s back at my house. I usually try and give ‘em a nice send-off, you know? A good meal - some of that teriyaki skirt steak from Shopper’s Corner, the real good kind. I’ve got some whiskey in my bag, if you think that’ll help you. I’m sorry you’re not going to be joining us for dinner, but ... you got the look of a trouble maker on you, kid. I don’t wanna risk you trying something stupid. Not when it’s gonna open any day now.”

“I’m not hungry, anyway,” Sam mutters. He twists away from the knife - can’t help himself - as it comes back up, the man leaning over him to keep his hips pinned to the stone, blood smearing along the sleeve of his flannel shirt.  
  
“Your loss,” the man says, shrugging. “It’s melt in your mouth good.”

 _Jesus fucking Christ,_ Dean would say, _are you really talking about steak when you’re getting ready to kill me?_ Sam grunts as the knife begins another journey across his skin, starting right below his left nipple and travelling horizontally across his chest to just below the right. “There, now you’re marked,” the man says in satisfaction. “It’ll be able to swallow you now. You want any of that whiskey, kid? This part’s the worst.”

“Sure,” Sam says. Licks his lips. “Yeah, I’ll take some. That’s, uh, nice of you.”

The man smiles as though Sam’s given him a birthday present and stoops to pick a battered pack off the ground without letting go of Sam’s wrists or shifting off of Sam’s torso. So much for that idea, Sam thinks, and then: where the _hell_ is Dean? The whiskey burns and he chokes on it a little, spits a bit to the side as best as he can manage. It goes mostly on the dirty edge of his sleeve and it’s settling hotly in his belly when Sam looks back up and meets the man’s serious gaze. “You want some more?”

Sam weighs a few extra seconds for Dean to reach him versus being too drunk to save himself, and shakes his head. The man nods and flattens the knife against his palm to stroke Sam’s cheek with his fingertips, just once. “It’ll be over quickly, I promise,” he says, and then draws back and positions the knife against Sam’s belly button, the muscles in his arm coiling for that quick downward strike -

The sound of the shotgun being cocked is deafening. It cuts through the panic that was just starting to curl its way through Sam’s stomach, leaving hot relief in its wake.

“You don’t wanna be doing that,” Dean says, his voice level. There’s only the faintest tremor at the edge of his voice.

The man freezes. “Where did you come from?” he asks hoarsely.  
  
“Mom always said the stork brought me,” Dean replies. Over the man’s shoulder, Sam can see the shotgun’s muzzle pressing hard against the back of his skull. “Step the fuck away from him.”

Dean has to reach upwards as the man drops the knife at Sam’s side and straightens, moving slowly away. He keeps the shotgun trained as he picks up the man’s knife and saws quickly through the rope around Sam’s wrists, his eyes flickering back and forth between his brother and his brother’s would-be murderer. He hands Sam the knife once his hands are free but keeps his other hand on Sam’s shoulder.

“Addison Newell, I presume?” he asks. Sam cuts his legs free as he sits up, and pulls the handgun from where it’s tucked into the back of Dean’s jeans, trains it on Newell. The whiskey burn is fading into hot anger and adrenaline.

Newell’s hands are raised, fingers pointing at the sky. “How do you know?” he asks. “You’re not one of them - you’re no use to me -” He stops and his face distorts so quickly that both of them tense, certain that he’s ready to spring. “You were in the house. You were _in my home_.”

And then just as quickly, the rage is gone and Newell’s face is filled with horror. “Where is the girl?” he breathes.

“Safe,” Dean says and they tense again as Newell falls to his knees heavily, his hands extended out towards them, pleading.

“You don’t understand,” he gasps. “You didn’t see what happened after Mary got away. All she did was die a hundred yards away from that stone instead of on top of it and _nine people_ died. It took me weeks to find a replacement for her but by then everything had happened already and it was all my fault. Please. Please, you have to give the girl back to me.”

“So you can kill her?” Dean bellows. “Hey, get _back on your knees_ until we _say_ you can get up.” His eyes flick to Sam’s: _what’s the situation?_

Sam leans in close to respond. “He’s been killing people for at least thirty-three years. Remember that thing we found out in the library, February, 1973? He thinks that that’s his fault, that he did something.”

“Maybe he was the one that killed all of them,” Dean mutters back.

“No, I didn’t kill those people,” Newell says brokenly. “Jesus, I’d never do that. But they - they were my fault. It’s my _job_ to keep it closed.”

“Keep what closed?” Sam hisses.

“The mouth to hell,” Newell says and Sam can feel his brother stiffen suddenly beside him. Dean’s voice, when he finally speaks, is quiet, warning Newell against something, something important that Sam has no clue about.

“What did you say?”

“Any day now it’s going to open,” Newell says, his voice getting higher and faster, his eyes panic-wide. His huge hands flex and clench around nothing and he’s got one knee up even though Dean is yelling at him again, _get on the fucking ground_ , “Any day now and I need to stop it, you don’t understand, he _needs to die_ -”

He’s on his feet, launching himself at Sam before they can even process what he’s screaming, that Sam needs to die to save everyone, and then Sam is knocked aside and Dean and Newell go down hard against the rock. Newell’s probably got eight inches on Dean and their bodies are too close together for Sam to see what they’re doing but before Sam can scramble to his feet Dean has Newell’s shirtfront clenched in his fists and he’s using it to turn them, flip Newell over, their feet skidding over the earth.

Newell’s skull cracks against the rock with a wet, sickening sound.

His body spasms, nearly bucks Dean off even as Dean does it again and again, fingers snarled in Newell’s hair and teeth bared. Newell’s grip around his throat loosens until he’s not moving at all and Sam is screaming for Dean to stop.

He can tell it’s too late but Sam still grabs Dean and lifts him bodily away from Newell. There’s brains, _fucking brains_ spread out over the rock in a corona around Newell’s head, blood on Dean’s hands and on his face. Dean’s sobbing for air but he fights hard against Sam for a second before he sags so abruptly that Sam stumbles backwards. He recovers almost as quickly and turns, breaking Sam’s grasp to grab him. His hands clench around Sam’s biceps hard enough that Sam flinches away. Dean doesn’t let him pull away completely, fingers skimming over the cross that was cut into Sam’s skin and his hands rising up to tug hard at Sam’s hair as though proving to himself that Sam is all right, he’s still alive.

“You ok?” he asks at last, voice rough.

“Yeah,” Sam says, “yeah, I’m ok.” He can’t say any more than that. His eyes flicker back and forth between Newell’s corpse and his brother’s face, splattered with gore. Dean’s eyes search his face and he releases Sam abruptly. He gives Sam a final pat on the shoulder before he moves away and picks up his shotgun. It had fallen out of his hands when he pushed Sam out of harm’s way.

“Yeah,” he repeats. He’s kneeling practically at Newell’s feet but his eyes are trained on the shotgun. The body has slid onto the ground, its back propped against the rock as though Newell’s only resting a bit. His hands are spread wide in his lap in mute supplication. Sam can’t stop staring.

“Dean,” he says softly, but Dean cuts him off before he can go any further.

“Yeah, I know.” Dean’s eyes flick up to Newell’s face. The man’s eyes are open, the thin tracery of veins inside them burst and filled with blood, but the way Dean’s looking at Newell, it’s like he wants nothing more than to kill him all over again. “Just a few more seconds and ...” Dean says, so softly that Sam isn’t sure that he’s supposed to hear.

Sam can’t bring himself to say, _Jesus, Dean, what did you do,_ so he says nothing at all. Dean’s fingers are trembling as he breaks open the shotgun, checks inside it even though it hasn’t been fired. His fingers, slipperly with blood, slide over the barrel and he nearly drops the gun. There are rock salt rounds inside that Dean could have shot Newell with a hundred times and never killed him with. Sam’s hand is clenched around Dean’s handgun, still forgotten by its owner, and Sam wants nothing more than to throw it away. His training overcomes irrational impulses easily, however, and he tucks it into his waistband before going over to where Dean is still kneeling at Newell’s side.

“You’ve got, um,” Sam says, gesturing at his own face. Dean nods and goes to swipe at his face with his sleeve before he realizes that he’s only wearing a T-shirt, and frowns. He uses the hem of his shirt instead, leaving tacky copper traces over his cheeks. Sam wants to sit next to his brother and rub the marks away, the way Dean used to do for him when he was small or still does sometimes, when they’re sitting in the car and Dean says he’s sick of Sam looking all gross. His hands have reached out but fall uncertainly back to his sides.

“We need to take care of him,” Sam says, when it begins to look as though Dean won’t. Dean’s head jerks around. His eyes are wide as he stares up at Sam. Sam can practically see the gears turning in Dean’s head, adjusting his thoughts until they make sense again.

“Shit,” Dean says, “the girl, I left her in my car.”

“Ok. You go take care of that. I’ll clean up,” Sam says softly and Dean obeys. He rests the barrel of the shotgun against his shoulder and makes his way back towards what Sam can only guess is the highway. Sam watches his brother until he can no longer see the black of his T-shirt through the slats of dusty sunlight drifting through the trees and then he returns to the girl’s - Mary’s - grave, clears a little firebreak, salts her bones and sets them on fire. Returns to the rock that Newell had tried to sacrfice him on. Drags Newell away from it by his boots. He salts Newell’s body even though he doesn’t have to and he watches the man’s skin bubble and his fat melt away in the heat. He salts it even though Dean isn’t there to see and there’s no one to take comfort from it but him.

 

  
  


 

Dean’s sitting with a young girl when Sam finally gets back to the car. He’s in the back seat with the door wide open, the girl asleep in his lap, her head curled against his shoulder. His button-up shirt looks enormous on her. He looks up at Sam and says nothing. He arms are curled halfway around her as though he rocked her to sleep.

Sam digs in the trunk for a new shirt before he opens up the passenger side door and sits down. They look out into the forest together. Dusk is finally coming to Santa Cruz; Sam thought that the day would never end. It seems like it was years ago that they fought Quintana. He can’t get the image of Newell’s brains out of his head, splashed around and so much more wet then Sam would have thought, but somehow he doesn’t think that he’s ever loved Dean more than he does right now. It’s bright and it hurts and Sam can barely even look at his brother.

“It’s a hellmouth,” Dean says in a colorless voice.

Sam glances over at him, startled. Dean doesn’t look over. “What?” Sam asks, frowning. “What did you say?”

“It’s a hellmouth,” Dean says again. “Otherwise known as, we’re totally fucked.”

  



	3. Chapter 3

  


  
  


 

_“This is John Winchester. If this is an emergency, call my son Dean. 866-907-3235.”_

He remembers making this call before, surrounded by the comforting stink of gasoline and hot pavement. Barely able to say through the tightness of his throat: I don’t know what to do, Dad. I need your help.

“Hey, Dad. I thought we were uh, over this whole not answering your phone thing after Chicago but ... Sam and I are in California. In Santa Cruz. And uh, there’s a hellmouth here.”

It’s easier this time with the sun on his face and sea salt in his nose rather than gasoline. His fingers wrap around hot metal of the railing and hang on. There are freckles on his knuckles and on the backs of his hands. Dean doesn’t have to look in the mirror to see them bridging across his nose and cheeks.

“There was this guy who’s been sacrificing people to it for the last thirty years or so, trying to keep it closed and I didn’t realize it until I’d - already put him out of commission. He’s not gonna be hurting anybody anymore, but the hellmouth could open any day and I don’t know how to stop it.”

There’s a noise from inside and Dean half-turns, listens intently. Sam had been in the shower when Dean gave up and finally dug his phone out of pocket, but Sam’s showers have shortened considerably since adolescence. He can’t see anything through the blinds, though, and after a moment he turns back and stares blindly out onto the water, swallowing hard.

“I guess you’re probably on that thing’s tail, but we’re - anything you know that could help us out ... anybody that you could call ... I know you’re still mad at Bobby, but I lost his number when my last phone got eaten and it seems like something he’d know about.”

_And I want to know you’re ok, that you didn’t drop dead after I made you leave us. I want you to know that I killed somebody just because I wanted to see him dead. Pick up, please, please, please, Dad._

“Anyway, uh ... call me back, Dad.”

Dean drops the phone into his jeans without looking down or focusing his eyes away from the glitter of sun on the waves. He stays that way for a long moment, one hand around the railing and the other just ghosting the top of the pocket.

He draws the blinds behind him when he steps back into the room. Sam’s out of the shower, sitting in front of his laptop without his shirt on. Dean’s stomach clenches when he sees the cross on Sam’s chest. The edges of the wound are still fresh and raw, secured every inch or so with adhesive strips. He glances over as Dean sits down on the bed, elbows resting on his knees.

“No luck?” he asks.

Dean rubs the heels of his hands over his eyes. “Nope,” he says. “We’re back to the answering machine game.”

“I hate that game,” Sam mutters, and Dean laughs.

“Yeah, me too.”

He can feel Sam’s eyes on him, questioning. Sam hasn’t stopped _staring_ at him since they dropped Mandy off at the hospital and told her that she fought her way free and she had no idea how she managed to get back into town. She had nodded like she expected that and took them both by the hand before stumbling off towards the emergency room.

Sam had looked at him hard and asked, “Are you ok?” before Dean could shut him up.

“You gonna cry on me if I say no?” Dean had asked, warily, and then spoken over Sam when he tried to answer. “I’m fine, dude. Why wouldn’t I be?”

And he _was_ fine. He had washed the killer’s blood off of his face when they got back to the motel and felt absolutely no urge to stand in the shower for hours or stare at his guilt-wracked face in the mirror or whatever it is Sam thought he should be doing. If he hadn’t slept all that great last night, well, that was the job, wasn’t it?

“So,” Sam says, “Hellmouths.”

“Yeah,” Dean agrees. He stands before he answers and, once standing, is at a loss. His feet move him aimlessly around the room as he speaks. “They’re portals to hell. A direct line, sort of. Like calling Satan’s Batphone, poof, down you go. Back in the day, they were believed to be momentary acts of god: they swallowed up the disbelievers and all that they owned and sent them into Sheol. It doesn’t really work that way, though - they’re more like ... _thin_ places, where something so evil has occured that it’s torn a hole in the world. That’s why Santa Cruz has been the focal point for so many evil sonsabitches. The hellmouth ... it attracts things like that.”

“Santa Cruz is rumored to be cursed,” Sam says thoughtfully. “Most people think that it’s because the name means ‘holy cross.’ That would explain why Quintana’s spirit showed up again, actually. If the hellmouth is opening soon, then it might be waking dormant spirits.”

“And that could mean that even if we can figure out where the hellmouth is, there’ll be other things for us to deal with,” Dean finishes. “Not just the local ghoulies, either. God only knows what’ll come running at the smell of this thing.”

Sam sighs heavily. It drove Dad nuts when he used to do that but today, Dean is on the same page as his little brother. What a pain in the ass this job has turned out to be, he thinks sourly.

“How do we figure out where the hellmouth is going to open?” Sam asks.

“You lived here, you should know the local history,” Dean says sourly. “You ever hear about something bad enough happening here?”

Sam shrugs. “Bad history with native minorities, of course, but it’s kind of hard to tell. The Ohlone didn’t have a written language and the Europeans and the Mexicans pretty much wiped them out within a few decades, so there’s not much known about their history before this area was colonized. I can’t think of anything that’s happened since then.”

Dean presses his knuckles over his eyes, hard, scrubbing away uncertainty like a child. The answer is there, stuck somewhere in his brain, nagging at him. He can feel the shape of the words on his tongue but the syllables refuse to come. Dad, he thinks, and the tumblers of memory click into place.

Dad’s journal is next to Sam’s elbow and Dean grabs for it, sliding into the seat across from him. Photos slide out as soon as he unclasps it; Sam’s been pawing through it again. Dean shuffles them back in with a practiced hand and flips towards the back. He grins when he reaches the right page and taps his finger against the word scrawled across the top of the page: POGONIP.

“There’s a curse over the area,” he says with satisfaction. “Not because of the holy cross thing. Something different.”

Sam takes the journal from Dean. His eyes flicker quickly back and forth over the page. “A massacre?” he asks. Dean nods, buoyed by the discovery. He doesn’t have to look at the journal to know what it says.

“The Yachicumne Indians, who lived up north, came and slaughtered the Branciforte tribe. It was said that you could go all the way through Pogonip and not touch the ground once, because the bodies of the dead were so thick upon the ground.” He raises his eyes to Sam’s face. “Pogonip goes all the way from the college up in the hills down to Holy Cross Church.”

Sam’s eyes harden. “Sounds like you could find a portal to hell up there, if you looked hard enough.”

 

  
  


 

“The hills have eyes,” Dean says, but Sam doesn’t think it’s funny at all.

There are eyes carved on the trees, great yawning curves hacked around the natural knotted wood. It’s a small tree, a kind that Sam doesn’t know, with white bark that shows the mutilation too clearly for Sam’s comfort. The eyes seem to roll towards them as they park the car and make their way towards the cemetery. The way is clogged with vines and headstones shattered by earthquakes or time, verse and memories etched below long forgotten names. The graveyard winds up a steep knoll, narrowing as it goes along, and under their feet, they can see signs of other visitors: red, white and black wax melted into the cracks of the path, brightly colored plastic wire winding itself around the graves, children’s toys hung carefully in the trees.

They pass through the trees and out into sprawling hillocks covered in wild grasses. The air is dusty and smells like childhood in some indefinable way; it’s a sweet, dry smell and Sam thinks of the swimming hole near Caleb’s house, where they used to stop and stay a while when the summers grew too long. Dean seems impervious to trips down memory lane: he spots the park map up ahead and starts bitching as soon as they reach it. Pogonip is _eight friggin miles of hiking trails_ and how are we going to find the entrance to hell in eight miles of trees?

“Do you really think it’ll be that hard?” Sam asks wryly, and Dean doesn’t respond.

Sam’s chest has been itching since last night but it’s gotten worse since they stepped into the boundaries of Pogonip. It’s not leading him on in the same way that they were able to find Mary’s grave, but it’s annoying enough that Sam knows they’re heading in the right direction. There’s a growing smell, like burnt hair and chrysanthemum tea, that’s making his head ache. He rubs at his nose fitfully and follows Dean down the path.

Golden grass gives way to the damp humidity of the redwoods. The trees close in on them with unsettling suddenness. Dean swats at branches and generally curses whatever hand of fate that’s led them back into a forest.

“Door number one sucked big time,” he complains, “and door number two was even worse. I bet we could hit Vegas by midnight, see if you’re any better at that spoon bending thing yet.”

“You really want to leave this alone?” Sam asks, incredulous.

Dean grins hopefully at him over his shoulder. “Just say the word, Sammy, and Cali will be in our dust.”

Sam shakes his head, irritated, and they walk on, mostly silent. The Walkman-cum-EMF reader makes a steady crackling noise in Dean’s hand as he sweeps it back and forth. Dean hums quietly.

“Does humming Alice Cooper help you relax, too?” Sam asks after a time. Dean jerks a little. He glances back at Sam, brow furrowed.

“What’re you talking about, dude?”

“The only time I’ve ever seen you humming is when you’re freaking out,” Sam says.

“Or when I’m choking on cock,” Dean answers helpfully, and laughs when Sam shoves at him.

“Seriously,” Sam says. He tries to put as much nuance as possible into the word, the way Dean seems to manage to: concerned, yet respectful of Dean’s space and ready to back off at any moment. He’s still a little surprised when Dean gives.

Dean speaks low and his pace slows a bit, closing the gap between him and Sam. “It’s just weird, you know? We’ve been killing things all our lives, but it was never personal. Most of them. Not for me, anyway - you know what I mean. You know how Dad gets sometimes.”

Sam, on shaky ground, tries, “We couldn’t have left him to kill people, Dean.” He hesitates, unsure of the words, _you did the right thing. There’s nothing to blame yourself for._ Except even Sam has to admit that there kind of is.

Dean only snorts, presumably echoing Sam’s own thoughts. “And now that he’s dead,” he continues, ignoring what Sam said, “we’re stuck at square one, without any information in a situation that’s so out of our league, it’s not even the same friggin’ sport.” He shakes his head. Enough of his face is visible that Sam can see the rueful smile curling Dean’s mouth. “You know, I’ve heard crazies say that before - I’m killing people to save people, that kind of stuff, but goddammit if he wasn’t telling the truth.” The EMF meter squeals briefly in his hand and they still. The noise doesn’t repeat itself.

“Kinda makes you wonder,” Sam says hesitantly as they resume walking. “What kind of life he must’ve led, you know? He really tried to make me comfortable. Offered me a steak dinner, of all things.”

The path is big enough for them to walk side by side now, and Dean doesn’t have to turn his head for Sam to get the full force of one raised eyebrow. “Are you sympathizing with that guy? Sam, he tried to _kill_ you.”

Sam shrugs. “Yeah, I’m aware, thanks. You don’t feel bad for him, even just a little bit? All that time he was out there ...”

“Yeah, and he wasn’t playing Monopoly,” Dean says flatly. “No. He was evil and he deserved what he got. If it wasn’t me, it would’ve been something else, sooner or later. You can’t walk away from consequences just because you had good intentions.”

“I guess,” Sam says.

The EMF reader buzzes again, this time for real: red lights going up all the way up the side of the stupid thing and at the same time, the wound carved into Sam’s body gives a violent wrench that makes him clutch at his chest reflexively. He looks down and sees the first dotting of blood soaking through his shirt.

“Shit,” he says. “This is one of my favorite shirts.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Oh, relax, princess. We’ll get it out when we get back to the motel.”

“Shit,” Sam mutters again. “This _hurts_.”

The EMF reader goes crazy as Dean sweeps his arm to the right, off the path and through a line of trees. The ground rises again beneath their feet as they follow it, and then back down again, and then through a shallow creek. Dean shakes the EMF reader occasionally, as if not fully trusting it to lead him in the right direction. The itch in Sam’s skin has only increased, however. Looking down at himself doesn’t improve his mood; the cross stands out sullenly against the dark blue of Sam’s t-shirt, vivid where the white greyhound stretches across his torso.

“That bothering you, Samantha?” Dean asks, without looking over.

Sam shakes his head. “Let’s just get this done.”

They falter in their steps when they near it; they can’t help it. It’s nothing more than a slight depression of earth, the way the ground might sink a little after a hasty burial, surrounded by the tangled roots of a burned out redwood. The tree itself is ancient, scorched even before the first white man claimed California. Glistening flies lumber heavily past their heads and Dean flinches back from one that comes too close to his face. The noise that their wings make is obscene, grating. There’s something in the air that Sam has no words for, the same thing that made his jaw ache in Capitola. He swallows hard against it and takes a step forward. Then another. Dean’s a few paces ahead and the look on his face is grim and tight. Sam can sympathize. His skin _crawls_.

Dean squats by the edge of the depression. Sam curls his hands at his sides to keep from pulling his brother back as Dean inches close, arms held out to keep himself balanced. He’s going to fall in, Sam _knows_ he’ll fucking fall into the mouth of hell because that would just be Dean. He holds his breath until Dean shuffles backwards until he’s a safe enough distance to stand. The ground squishes underneath his feet as he walks back to Sam. The earth under Sam’s own feet is bone dry.

“No sir, I don’t like it,” Dean says. His face is pale in the sunlight and his freckles stand out.

“What do we do about it?” Sam asks. He scrapes his fingers up and down the strap of the duffel bag, seeking reassurance.

Dean shrugs. “Seal it, if we can.”

“And if we can’t?”

Dean’s smile twists off to the center, bitterly. “Then we get to stay here forever, killing whatever evil things come out of that hole. That'll be fun, won't it? You could even go back to law school.”

Dean’s eyes flicker as he stares at Sam, challengingly, and the outline of his body blurs as Sam tries to focus on him. His eyes are watering and there’s a tightness in his chest that has nothing to do with the blood soaking through his t-shirt. He feels unclean just standing in the air that the hellmouth exhales into the world. His brain wants to throw itself headlong into what Dean is saying, to strike out and wound as deeply as possible.

“What are you talking about?” he says, one hand coming up to his forehead. “What are you -” he tries again and then his knees buckle.

Dean catches Sam before he hits the ground and they ease down slowly until Sam is braced on his knees, one hand planted flat on the ground, the other clutching at his chest. Blood slides his shirt across his skin. Dean’s hand wraps around the back of his neck and Sam concentrates hard on that, on those thick fingers clutching, reassuring, steadying, until he can see again. Dean lifts his face up by the chin, looks hard into Sam’s eyes. “Was that the Shining or you avoiding the subject?” he asks.

Sam’s laugh is wheezy. “You think I’m that passive-aggressive?”

“I put nothing past you,” Dean says grimly. “You did shoot me in the face once.” He lifts Sam from under his arms and together, they put some distance between themselves and the hellmouth. Sam’s head clears with every step and when they get to the treeline, he’s able to seat himself with some grace at the foot of a redwood.

“I didn’t shoot you in the face, you freak,” he says, rubbing his own. “And I said I was sorry.”

Dean hunkers down beside Sam. “Could’ve gotten me a card,” he mutters. He passes a hand over his face before turning towards Sam. “Take your shirt off.”

It’s more painful than it looks. The edges had begun to scab over before they split open, and there are darker clumps of congealed blood mixed with the fresh. Dean digs into the duffel bag and lifts out a plastic bottle shaped like the Virgin Mary. He regards it with a disgusted expression. “This is all we got, I guess,” he says, and tips it over onto Sam’s chest.

Sam has never been possessed. When he was thirteen, Dean’s shoulder was slashed open by a werewolf and Sam had poured holy water over his brother while their father had held him down. For a long time it had been the worst thing he could remember, far worse than any injury he had ever sustained himself: the way the blood had foamed exactly in the same way as the baking soda and vinegar volcano he had made in class that week. The way their father had lain almost underneath Dean, his arms hooked underneath Dean’s as though holding him back from a fight. He hadn’t screamed and afterwards Dad had mussed a hand through Dean’s sweaty hair approvingly, but he had bitten nearly through the tip of his tongue in keeping quiet. Dean had spat blood for weeks, the slightest mishap reopening the wound. It had never gotten any less terrifying.

Sam has been splashed with holy water and he’s drank it and on a few occasions he’s been made to bathe in it, but he’s never been cleansed with it, and he’s completely unprepared.

He flails blindly out at Dean, who grabs him by the shoulders and hangs on like grim death until Sam stops screaming and his breath comes in sobbing gulps. The holy water landed uncapped by his knees and there’s water soaking through his jeans by the time he can feel it. He scrambles away from it even though there isn’t any pain. “What the _fuck_ ,” he gasps.

Dean’s voice comes from very far away and Sam squints hard at him, willing his eyes to focus. There’s sunlight on his face but a grimy chill over his skin and it isn’t until Sam really hears what Dean is saying - _he did something to you, I **knew** it _ \- that it all clicks.

“He marked me, that’s what he said,” Sam says, the words all tumbling over themselves in a rush of certainty. “So that the hellmouth could - could swallow me.”

Dean stares at him, eyes ludicrously wide, conntecting the dots: your soul is now _plugged into_ that thing and it doesn’t really matter if you didn’t end up with your guts all over that rock, it’s going to get you anyway because we _don’t know_ how to stop it from opening. He turns away before Sam can see the flicker of other things in his eyes, the thought that goes _if I was faster_ and never lets up.

Dean stares down at the t-shirt fisted in his hand rather than at Sam, and he dabs carefully at the reddened wound for a moment before laying it aside and stripping off his own button-up shirt and handing it wordlessly to his brother. Sam shrugs it on but doesn’t button it up, staring down at his own chest.

“You know,” he says, and Dean looks up. “With the way you drive, I bet we could make Vegas by ten.”

It’s been a long time since Sammy would do or say anything to make Dean laugh, but it’s a good feeling nonetheless when he succeeds.

“I think that thing is screwing with our perceptions,” he says after a time. His eyes are wet and although he doesn’t feel like tearing Dean’s throat open anymore, there’s a tension in his skin that makes him want to scratch himself bloody.

Dean nods, aware of it already. “Figured that was the case. Makes sense, if we’re standing close enough to Satan’s doorstep that we could spit in his face.” It isn’t an apology, but Sam doesn’t really expect one. After all, he had to ask if he owed Dean one after shooting him in the chest. He helps Sam to stand and they turn back towards the hellmouth as one, drawn and repulsed by it.

It’s harder to approach the hellmouth a second time, like reaching for a fire even though you’ve already been burned. The grating in his skull intensifies with every step. Dean looks like he’s bitten into a lemon but he keeps pace with Sam. The ground turns soggy underneath their feet.

There are maggots in the depression, the slightest hint of bleached animal bones and hair. Sam can feel Dean reaching a foot out to poke at it and elbows him in the side. He can’t stop _looking._ Wondering whether, when it opens, it will split the earth wide like a mouth or whether it would be like quicksand underneath your feet, one misstep and you’re gone as if you were never there.

“I think there’s something under there,” he whispers, as if it will hear him. It’s impossible to think.

“No shit, Sammy,” Dean returns. “It’s _hell_.”

“No,” Sam tries again, “I mean, I think there’s something _right here_ , right underneath us. I think it _sees_ us. Sees _me_.”

Dean cocks his head and listens. He looks faintly ridiculous that way but Sam stares at his brother rather than let his eyes get drawn back to the hellmouth. After a moment, he shakes his head but Sam can’t tell if it’s because he can’t sense whatever’s got its fingers around the back of Sam’s neck or if it’s just simple disgust at the entire situation. Dean lets his head drop forward and it’s a long time before he stands straight again.

They’re quiet on the way back. Sam makes stabs at conversation but Dean stares at the road, a cigarette in the hand that isn’t on the wheel. It’s discomfiting, to say the least; they’ve spent days on the road with barely more than directions passing between them but now Dean is withdrawn. Unresponsive.

Sam doesn’t blame him, exactly. The stench of the hellmouth lingers in his nose and the world looks _different_ , even though they left Pogonip behind and are driving back to Capitola. It makes Sam think of those posters that were popular when he was small, the ones that you had to stare at until your eyes crossed before, suddenly, there would be a hidden image burned against the back of your eyelids. In the clearing, the hellmouth stained the color of all that was around them and once Sam has seen it, he can’t stop seeing it.

The silence gets to him anyway.

 

  
  


 

Dean goes to the car to fetch the jug of Axion as Sam heads to the bathroom to tend to his wounds. There’s a pathetic lack of parking in the Capitola Village, so he hoofs it up a steep hill with a million dollar view of the ocean on one side and a trailer park on the other. He gives his car a pat on her rump before he opens the trunk, glancing around before propping the false bottom up with a shotgun.

The Impala smells like leather and gun oil and it helps clear some of the salt air from Dean’s nose. He breathes it in gratefully as he cuts the Axion from the arsenal and sets it at his feet. Digs out one of the larger water bottles, one of the ones that’s not filled with holy water, and it joins the Axion; might as well make sure that if he has to wash blood off his dumbass brother again, it’s not going to make him scream like a schoolgirl. Grabs another duffel and empties the clothing from it so that he doesn’t look like a tool walking back to the motel, stuffs the Axion and the water in it along with a few odds and ends, protection amulets and the like. It won’t do much against the devil’s back door, but it makes him feel just a little bit better.

He’s laying flat out on his bed by the time Sam gets out of the bathroom, still stripped to the waist and moving gingerly, a button-up shirt in his hand. The butterfly strips are a bit crooked but it looks as though Sam’s smeared half a tube of ointment around the edges, and Dean judges that he’ll be all right. Sam’s t-shirt is already soaking in the ice bucket, mixed with water and a healthy dose of the enzyme detergent. They’ll wash it later in normal soap whenever they do laundry next. Preferably in some other state than this one, assuming that they survive this one. After a while he hears Sam tapping on the laptop’s keys. For once, his brother’s keeping quiet.

Dean remembers when he didn’t talk in much the same way he remembers the night of their mother’s death, when things became too large and scary and all of the words he had learned so early became caught in his throat in the same way the smoke did. He had a cough for weeks afterwards because he disobeyed for just a moment, hesitated just long enough to see the flames licking the ceiling of the hallway. That feeling, that dry and dirty taste in his mouth used to come back to him whenever he doused something in gasoline and set it to burn.

He knows that Sam’s curious. Probably irritated too, if the carefully neutral look on his face is anything to go by. Dad knew to leave Dean alone when he got this way, which was never often, but Sam has never been able to resist shoving his nose into other people’s space.

It’s hard to think around the bubble of panic and anger that’s taken root in his head, but for as long as he’s been old enough to understand the words, Dad’s been telling him that panic was never an excuse to do nothing.

Instead, Dean stares up at the holes in the ceiling and dives into the catalogue of his memory, calling up faces and names of the people they’ve saved over the years, their problems and the solutions. It’s a long list and he’s probably the only one that knows it: they’ve been stepping stones to Dad and a series of annoyances to Sam. He turns to the myths next, hundreds of legends told during nighttime drives or over beer or a campfire.

It’s a series of questions in his mind that sound like Dad’s coaching: _What started it?_ An Indian massacre. _Any local legends you can use?_ No. The Ohlone worshipped the sun, had trickster myths, none of them useful. _Move on, then. Find something that **is.**_ They’d toss possibilities back and forth like that on the drive between jobs, Dad waiting patiently for him or Sam to come up with the right answer. Piece together the clues, talk to someone who knows, make sure you have what you need to take it down.

Only they have no clues except for a soft place in the earth that made Dean’s spine want to crawl out of his body, and if anybody in John Winchester’s extensive lists of contacts had ever closed a hellmouth before, they’d know about it. But that kind of thinking is about as useful as tits on a bull, his father’s voice reminds him.

Dean’s so deep in thought that he’s dozing a little bit, his body growing heavier as his brain slips away, pawing through each tiny compartment in his mind where all the important things are kept. He sweeps the country by state, east coast heading towards the west and it’s a good thing that he finds the answer before he ever gets there, because he never liked the west coast all that much anyway.

“Sipapu,” he says as his eyes slide open. The clicking of keys stops abruptly.

“Bless you?” Sam ventures.

Dean shakes his head, not in negation to what Sam said but as a dog might shake water out of its ears. His voice sounds sluggish and drunk to his own ears and he’s only beginning to realize that he’s felt that way for days. The fog in his head never really cleared after that knock on the head in Holy Cross Church and he’s been confusing a concussion with something far worse. “Sipapu,” he says again. “It’s an Anasazi spirit gate. A passageway between the spirit world and the living world, where the dead could pass through to find rest.”

Sam’s eyes are flat and vaguely annoyed. “So what? Does it make a difference whether we call this a hellmouth or a sipoopoo?”

Dean sits up at that, glaring at Sam. He doesn’t bother to repeat the word a third time. “You probably don’t remember when this Kachina cult was stirring up trouble down in Mesa Verde. You were staying with Pastor Jim, some kind of school play or something that you kicked up a fuss about when we needed to leave.” He’s usually pretty good at keeping the bitterness out of his voice, far better than Dad ever was. “We went down with that kid that was living with him at the time -”

“Peter, I remember,” Sam says dryly. “And it was the SATs.”

“- Peter the grad student, yeah.” Peter the grad student had missed getting his Masters by three months; a harpy in Rhode Island had ended his educational career by way of a few claws through his throat, all that work just to die face down on some beach where the crabs plucked his eyes from his skull before he was found by a little girl building sandcastles. Two months later Sam had announced he was going to Stanford and Peter had never seemed to cross his mind, not through all the fights with Dad.

“The way the story goes,” Dean continues, “is that the ancestors of the Anasazi, the First People, came through the original sipapu. For a long time, the dead would be able to pass back and forth between the spirit world and the living world, through the sipapu, until Coyote covered it with a stone and closed it up. The idiots in Mesa Verde thought that they’d be able to reopen the original sipapu, only they were just standing around some ancient well and chanting. Created enough energy to draw forth a couple of bear spirits before we could shut them down, then we rolled a boulder over it and sealed it with something out of that book Dad stole from Bobby.”

Sam frowns, waiting for more. When nothing else is forcoming, he says, “That’s it, then? That’s the plan? We roll a rock over it and cross our fingers?”

“You have a better idea, sacrifice-boy?” Dean asks, testily. “We could roll _you_ on top of it, your head is made of rock anyway.”

Sam scowls at the laptop’s screen without really seeing it. After a moment, he types an address into Firefox. Dean’s jaw clenches when he sees the all-too-familiar red lettering pop up on the screen: STANFORD UNIVERSITY. “What are you doing?”

“Checking out the deadline for fall enrollment,” Sam says casually, not looking at Dean. “You said it first; I might as well go back to law school if we’re going to be stuck watching this thing for the rest of our lives.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Dean asks. Sam glances up when the tone of Dean’s voice finally registers with him. “That thing opens, it’s gonna eat you like a french fry. You think Stanford has correspondance courses to hell?”

“Rolling a rock on top of it isn’t going to work,” Sam says heatedly.

“I don’t see you coming up with anything better!”

“I haven’t been breathing demon lore for the past four years, have I? All that shit that Dad’s been stuffing down your throat and you can’t think of something just a little bit less stupid?”

They’re toe to toe, Dean’s head tilted so he can stare Sam in the face, one hand fisted in the open front of Sam’s shirt. His knuckles brush against the red line of the cross but Sam doesn’t flinch. He only stares down at Dean with loathing in his eyes.

And suddenly Dean is tired. All of his anger turns to stone in his chest, the world blurring just a little bit before he can blink hard enough to set it right again. The sun’s low enough in the sky that it’s sending blades of sunlight through the half-closed blinds, throwing Sam’s face into enough shadow that he’s almost unrecognizeable, those ridiculous twists of hair transformed into something ugly and strange. Dean pulls away, skin rasping on flannel and Sam follows, pushing and shoving, his teeth bared. They’ve never fought this way, clumsy hands that mean to hurt - Dean’s hands had been too busy pushing apart Sam and Dad’s when things went too far - but it’s all too easy to just _give in_ to everything that has been building since they crossed the county line, compounded again and again by stress and fear until it’s actually, honestly unbearable.

He can barely say anything, all of his words swallowed down below jagged breathing that sounds far too loud even in the wide space of the motel room. “Yeah, I know you weren’t learning demon lore for the last four years,” Dean sneers, “You were studying _useful life skills_ like - like calculus and shit, stuff that’ll really put food on your plate and keep you safe, right?” Sam laughs as he stumbles over his words, hardly able even to imagine what people actually study in Stanford. It’s an ugly sound.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Sam returns, his own hands fisted in Dean’s shirt now, trying to make Dean give up his ground. “Useful life skills like cultural anthropology and abnormal psychology, something you and Dad would know _lots_ about.”

“Leave Dad out of this!” Dean roars.

“Why?” Sam shouts back, even louder. “He’s in the middle of everything anyway! He’s not here, Dean! You don’t have to be impressing him! How many times have you called him since, Chicago, huh? How many times has he called _you_?”

 _“Leave him out of it,”_ Dean growls. It’s a noise even uglier than Sam’s laughter.

“ _You_ never do,” Sam hisses. Spittle flies from his mouth and hits Dean’s cheeks. He flinches away and Sam pursues, pressing down on the nerve. “Just _quit it._ Quit trying to sound like him. You only think this stupid rock idea’ll work because it worked for Dad!”

“It _will_ work, it _has_ to!” Dean shouts, hysteria crawling up his throat. His eyes burn but he couldn’t unlock his hands from Sammy’s shirt if life depended on it.

“No it won’t! We can think of something better if you’d just let me help! You don’t have to take care of everything, Dean!”

_“I have to take care of you!”_

The words are out before he can take them back, spilling over Dean’s edges. His breath stops in his throat as the last sound escapes it, closing it tight. And Sam only stares at him, his mouth hanging open, his eyes wide.

“Dean -” Sammy says hesitantly, and Dean cuts him off.

“I have to take care of you,” he repeats. It’s the only thing he can think to say. He shakes Sam by his shirt, once, and then lets go of his brother. Sam’s hands fall away at the same moment and he takes a step back. They avoid each other’s eyes but Dean steps forward anyway, helplessly. His hands spread at his side when Sam tenses. “That’s all that - it’s the only thing -” He falters.

“Dean, I -” Sam’s voice trails off on its own this time. He looks down at his feet. Dean stares at Sam’s bowed head and clears his throat. It doesn’t really help.

“Look,” he says gruffly. “Don’t make me say it out loud, ok? I sound stupid enough already, don’t make me say it, Sammy.”

Sam nods slowly, his eyes flickering back and forth between Dean’s face and the carpet beneath his toes. “It’s not gonna work,” he says. “A rock, Dean, Jesus. It won’t work.”

“We’ll make it work,” Dean says, and his voice has enough certainty in it that Sam looks up and finally holds Dean’s gaze. “There’s nothing else,” he says, and Sam drops his eyes.

“Ok,” Sam says at last. “What do we need?”

  



	4. Chapter 4

  
  


 

Dean has a small arsenal spread out on the floor in front of him when Sam returns from the hardware store, a small bowl full of oil at his side. He gives Sam a nod when the door shuts behind him and then lifts a barrel to his eyes and squints down the dark tunnel. Sam is tempted to ask him if he’s planning on shooting Belezbub, but at this point, he’s not sure whether Dean would crack a joke or simply punch him in the face. He sits on the bed behind Dean, his knee brushing Dean’s shoulder, and rolls the brown paper bag between his hands. The ball bearing rattles slightly and he feels stupid for a moment, as if he and Dean are gonna go tag the local skate park. The feeling is fleeting; he feels scraped raw and not at all ready to go and face what waits for them in the dying light.

Dean’s hands are steady around the shotgun as he loads it with rocksalt, tucking extra rounds into the pockets of his jeans, but his eyes are wide as he glances up at Sam. “What color did you get?”

“White,” Sam answers. “Seemed to make sense.”

Dean nods and turns back to his task, his fingers moving confidently even when his attention is elsewhere, dividing up their weaponry between useful and dead weight. The spraypaint goes into Sam’s duffel with the shotgun, rocksalt, chalk and everything else that stays put in that bag. Dad’s journal is tucked into the inner pocket of Dean’s jacket, even though Dean has already taken pains to let Sam know that he’s got the sigil they want memorized.

“Stick out your hands,” Dean commands, turning towards him and pushing himself up on his knees. Sam does as he’s told, even when Dean pulls a pink Sharpie out of his pocket and pushes Sam’s sleeves up. He turns Sam’s hands over, palms to the ceiling, and uncaps the Sharpie with his teeth.

“Are you fucking with me?” Sam has to ask.

Dean shoots him an impatient glance. “You’re the one that bought the friggin’ multipack. Don’t bitch when this is the only color that’s left.”

“It wouldn’t be the only color left if you weren’t such a bitch about using it,” Sam grumbles, but he holds still as Dean drags the tip across his skin. “You wear _purple_ , man.”

He knows the symbols that bloom across his wrists but only vaguely, the way you might know the lyrics to a song you can’t ever remember hearing before. Protection has always been more of Dean’s thing than Sam’s or Dad’s. “Purple’s manlier than pink,” Dean mutters. His elbows dig hard into the muscle above Sam’s knees.

“Yeah, whatever, Liberace,” Sam says, and hisses laughter through his teeth when Dean traps a bit of his arm between two knuckles and twists hard.

He keeps watching his brother as Dean turns his hands over and decorates the back of Sam’s knuckles in the same swirling pink, as focused on this task as he had been while cleaning the guns. Sam finds it hard to put much stock in anything that’s the same color as bubble gum and cotton candy, but the set of Dean’s shoulders loosen as he works, the hard edge in his eyes slowly fading.

Sam’s been relaxing by degrees since he closed the motel door behind him, with every minute that ticks by where Dean shows no inclination to keep talking. Between the time that Sam stumbled out of the motel room and when he returned, Dean seemed to have put himself back together in whatever order he needed, for which Sam is very grateful. There were years in which Sam whittled away at his brother’s personality, stripping it away until he actually believed that there was nothing to Dean except for that con artist flash and loose tongue. That Dean was nothing beyond his father’s good little soldier.

It’s pretty damn uncomfortable, finding out that he was wrong. He wants to ask Dean, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” But the answer’s obvious, even to Sam.

Dean puts the Sharpie away at last and hauls himself to his feet. He puts as much weight as possible on Sam’s knees but he turns a bright grin on Sam when he’s standing. “You ready to go?”

No, Sam thinks, and stares up into his brother’s face. It’s the exact same smile Dean would give him whenever Dad made him cry, when he was too scared to go into some place scary or when they were lost and alone. An _I’m not gonna let anything happen to you_ kind of smile, home and safety and everything wrapped up in a bright flash of teeth that creates such an intense bubble of relief in Sam’s chest that he instantly feels ridiculous.

“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s go.”

 

  
  


 

He thinks that he can still smell the faintest rot of corpse in the car, Mary’s parting gift to them, and hopes that Dean can’t smell it as well.

The streets should be quiet around them. There should be empty roads and darkened windows marking their passage, silent witnesses. There’s traffic on the highway instead and Dean curses the tourists before swinging them off onto meandering sidestreets. Sam had almost wanted to ask if maybe they could put it off, wait until daybreak but as soon as they stepped out of the hotel he could feel the hellmouth’s grip on him tighten. It might not open tonight, but Sam doesn’t really believe it.

Dean’s fingers tap on the wheel as he drives. Sam studies the sigil in Dad’s journal that might or might not save his life. The printout of the sipapu symbol is warm in his pocket, easy enough to memorize: a tiny labryinth enclosed by the lines of mother earth, a ladder stretching out of the world itself. He still doesn’t believe, not really, but he thinks that Dean’s right ... whether or not there’s no other option than rolling stones, they’ve run out of time to find it.

The sun’s a sliver above a horizon lost in the trees by the time they reach Pogonip. They retrace steps they first took barely twelve hours ago. The bag doesn’t feel nearly heavy enough on Sam’s shoulder and he shifts it impatiently. Dean walks with his hands stuffed into his pockets and his mouth drawn into a grimace, and it occurs to Sam that when they first came here, he actually thought it was beautiful. The darkness hides the wild grass and plays tricks with his senses, and the smell of burned hair and chrysanthemum is naseauting.

Dean leads the way, even when there’s room for them to walk side-by-side.

There’s an itch all over his body that makes him think of insects, how after you swat a single spider you feel them crawling invisibly over your skin for hours afterwards. Dean hates spiders, hates them the same way that he hates rats and centipedes and all things that scamper or twitch or are generally disgusting, and he brushes at his cheeks and arms irritably. It doesn’t take them long enough to get back to the hellmouth.

The maggots glisten wetly in the moonlight, and they make it seem as though the hellmouth is grinning at them. Dean bares his teeth at it and feels a little better. They set their gear down a few yards away where the ground is still safe and dry. He hands the spray paint to Sam and takes the salt for himself.

They start with the ladder, inching as close as they dare to make the straight line radiating outwards from the hellmouth. Dean keeps a firm grip on the back of Sam’s t-shirt as Sam moves backwards, a thick white stripe appearing in front of him. Dean salts the line, standing beside Sam to reach. They crabwalk to the left to begin the sipapu itself, the beginning of the maze. There’s enough light to see the printout clearly and Sam divides his attention almost equally between it and the lines he’s laying down, trusting Dean not to let him slip. They move quickly and efficently.

“The things that we hunt,” Dean had said to Sam, “they have to follow certain rules, right? So what we’re gonna do is set up a few guidelines for it to follow. A sipapu is symbolic; it can be anything from a hole in the ground to an actual structure. The Kachina cult were using an old well, but before anything could come out of it, they had to supercharge it. They drew this symbol on the ground around it, to sanctify the area and draw the spirits to it.”

It feels a little bit like the demon on the plane and the comparison is enough to set Dean’s heart thumping, if it hadn’t been beating doubletime already. By painting the mother earth symbol on the ground around the hellmouth, it’s like setting up a neon sign in the underworld: COME AND GET IT.

“We’ll make ourselves a big fat target for a few minutes, but then it has to follow our rules. And _our_ rules say that it can be sealed by a stone.”

The earth shakes beneath their feet as they move from the sipapu to the kiva interior, the outer walls of the labryinth. They glance up at each other, each bent over, and share a weak grin. “Eat at Joe’s,” Dean says, and Sam manages a shaky laugh. He can see the energy forming below them, the honey color of their spirit gate and the oily darkness underneath. The light is stronger where there’s more walls, brighter and cleaner, thick on the ground. And finally, Sam feels a thin flicker of hope in his chest.

The sipapu hurts to look at by the time they’re finished with it. The crisp lines are stark in the pale light, brighter than the maggots that squirm at the base of the ladder. They look strong and solid and Sam actually smiles as they look for a boulder small enough to carry between them. They don’t find one of those but they find one that they can get rolling, and that’s good enough. It’s smaller than the hellmouth, far smaller; even from yard away they can tell that they could fit two stones this size and still have some room to spare, and they share a long, considering look. Nothing for it, really.

Sam’s been bleeding since they stepped into the clearing, his scabs breaking open once again and oozing sullenly into his undershirt. It’s annoying more than anything, his attention focused tightly on the task at hand. He digs a flashlight out of their bag and holds it steady as Dean traces the sigil onto the rock. He looks ridiculous, hunkered down, his face only inches away from the surface. Lines of quartz glint in the light.

The wind starts as they move themselves into position behind the boulder, careful not to smear their hands against the chalk. They’re in the lee as long as they’re hunched against the rock, ready to push, and they grimace at each other. It gets harder with every step they take, the wind against them, everything that waits inside the hellmouth pushing them away. Sam’s feet slip in the wet earth. Then the weight is gone, the boulder is rolling down into the hollow and they turn towards it expectantly, already smiling -

It’s like quicksand. He had known the truth when he had looked into the hellmouth and felt what was beneath it. It’s like quicksand. The boulder, which had looked so substantial, rolls uneasily like a cork in the water and then sinks. It’s slow enough that Sam has time to feel his stomach sinking with it and the first spark of real fear.

They stare, mouths open, and then Dean holds up a hand without looking at Sam. “Don’t say it,” he says, his voice harsh. “Don’t you fucking say it.”

“I told you so,” Sam says, and Dean moans. The helplessness of it sends another spike of fear through Sam’s belly.

The ground is crumbling where they rolled the stone, heaving itself into the air. There are bones and the stench of rotted meat and ozone so strong that it sends them stumbling backwards, gasping. Tears roll down Sam’s cheeks and he rubs furiously at his eyes, his nose, gagging. Their last meal is hours away from them and Sam is glad for it; all his stomach can bring up is a thin stream of bile that he spits into the grass.

“What do we do?” He has to shout over the wind. Dean grabs him by the elbow when he nearly pitches forward, steadying him. Dean’s eyes are wide. Panicked. He shakes his head, the muscles in his jaw working.

It’s as much the smell as what’s under their feet that makes Sam turn his head, his stomach clenching again, trying to bring itself up. The sense of what they’ve gathered to themselves is palpable, a physical grip around his throat, tightening itself in bands across his chest. They’ve made it stronger. Whatever is down there is laughing at them, as much as things like that can laugh, a cold breath across his cheek that feels like death buried beneath the ice.

“How did Newell make this thing go away?” Dean yells. He spreads his feet across the ground, trying to balance.

“He just carved people up on that rock!” Sam shouts back.

“How many at a time?”

“Just one, I think!” They’re losing ground, slipping backwards on the frosted grass. “Mary got away and he didn’t have a back-up or anything like that, it just opened until he could find another one!”

Dean’s grip on his elbow is the only warmth on his entire body. His arms curl in on themselves and he shudders. The wind cuts through his clothes and bites deeply into his bones. They ache in a way that he’d nearly forgotten about, his mind calling up nights where he could almost feel them cracking apart, when he had shot up six inches in a matter of weeks and he had always been sick with hunger. They feel like they’re coming apart now, disintegrating in the face of the hellmouth’s greed. He turns his face away to vomit again and this time blood splashes across the white lines of the sipapu. Dean’s moan echoes the hellmouth’s, agonized instead of eager.

Sacrifice. It beats through Sam’s mind like a drum. _But I’m not on the rock!_ But the hellmouth is opening regardless, strengthened by their stupidity, _it’s gonna eat you like a french fry._ It needs a sacrifice but that’s never stopped anything before, just delayed it for a few months or a year until Newell could murder somebody else. And more than that, overrunning every coherent thought, _he doesn’t want it to be him._ He doesn’t want to be swallowed by that thing below their feet, _doesn’t want to die._ He doesn’t want his brother to pick up where Newell left off, chained to the hellmouth and slitting open bellies to placate it.

_Sacrifice_ , his mind screams, and then the answer blazes bright and painful across his mind. He can feel the truth of it, the _rightness_ of it without having to say it aloud.

All of Newell’s victims had gone screaming, struggling, crying. All of them had been dragged from their lives and had died in pain and terror. But it was a weak sacrifice, an unworthy one, _unwilling._

He turns towards his brother, words already forming before he sees Dean’s eyes and they’re choked off in his throat. There’s none of the panic that he expected to see mirrored on Dean’s face; instead, he looks almost calm and realization hits Sam like an actual blow.

“ _No_ ,” he says, and Dean shakes his head.

“Sammy,” Dean says, but Sam cuts him off, fists clenched.

“It’s out of the fucking question, Dean,” he yells, pushing his hair out of his eyes with the back of one fist. “We don’t even know what’s gonna happen if it opens! Just because it, it sees me or whatever it doesn’t mean - just - _no!_ No way!” He grasps for logic and it’s knocked out of his hands by the sheer fucking stupidity of what he sees in Dean’s face.

“It’s the only way, Sammy,” Dean says levelly. His voice has dropped but Sam hears it over the wind anyway, each word carefully shaped. “You know it just as well as I do.”

“It’s _not_ ,” Sam grits out. He opens his mouth to say more but the hellmouth itself interrupts him, cuts him off with a whining shriek that they feel more than hear and both of them flinch away from it instinctively. Dean’s eyes stay fixed to where the hellmouth is widening but Sam jerks his arm against his chest and Dean, one hand still grasping Sam’s elbow, stumbles forward until Sam’s mouth is almost against his ear. “It’s _not_ the only way and even if it was -”

They stare at each other without speaking and it’s Dean who looks away first. “Ok,” he says, “fine. All right, Sammy. We’ll find some other way.”

And Sam grins. Believes him. Turns away for just a moment, eyes flickering back to the hellmouth, brain already moving on towards other possibilities and then Dean’s fist connects with the underside of his jaw.

He hits the ground hard, arms and legs numb, his skull connecting with something hard in the grass. He feels blood welling in his ear and then trickling down the side of his neck and into his hair, his mouth shaping words but no sound coming out. And then he sees Dean’s face above his own, heedless to the cracked whisper of _no no no Dean please no_ that finally pushes itself out of his throat. Dean reaches out and lays one hand against the side of Sam’s face, thumb stroking over Sam’s temple.

“Don’t you come after me,” Dean says, his voice raw.

And then he’s gone, and Sam is alone.

 

  
  


 

Dean never wanted to die. He had never really thought about it one way or the other. Dad was indestructible, Sammy was irreplaceable; what he was or what he wanted never really came into question. It changed after the rawhead, of course. He tossed out a joke for Sam and when Sam didn’t bite, told him the truth: I’m gonna die, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It felt like the truth but it didn’t help either of them all that much.

He hadn’t wanted to die then, not in a hospital, not in a tent that stunk of sickness and desperation, not even with his brother beside him. The price that had been paid for his skin hadn’t been worth it but he’d accepted it as best he could and moved on, saving the lives of a whole lot of people along the way. It had shaken him, to literally stare Death in the face, but apparently the lesson hadn’t stuck because he moves without hesitation and leaps without looking back.

Maggots burst beneath his feet and a sharp edge of broken bone opens up a groove in his cheek. He can feel it surging against him, squeezing painfully and it’s wet and tight like a mouth greedily sucking him down, and then there’s nothing.

There’s a darkness of the sort that you never see past childhood, the kind that lives in nightmares and in the deaths of loved ones. It isn’t the absence of light and it isn’t a place where light has never shown because it isn’t a place. It isn’t anything; it’s the opposite of is. It’s everywhere and everything; all that’s cold and hateful and wrong. It’s being so far underwater that there’s no light left. It’s being buried alive.

And in the hellmouth is something else, a _thing_ that wraps itself around him, caresses him. He flinches away, all reason and rationality left behind where Sam lies bleeding on the grass. It speaks to him, gusting through the cracks in his sanity, crumbling the edges away until it has a foothold in his brain. It’s unbearably gentle and he scrambles back from it as best as he’s able, every nerve in his body screaming, rejecting the slide of _nothingness_ that eases itself up his spine. He cries out, everything that’s ever made him strong stripped away until he screams into the darkness like a child, _daddy it **hurts**._

_Dad_ , he sobs, _Sammy, Sammy, Dad_ and it licks away his terror like it was sucking tears off his face. It’s so _hungry_.

The word spins in nauseating circles through his head and it’s just enough to grab onto: those greedy lips sucking him down, the slobbering panting _hunger_ prying at him. Whatever he’s done - he can barely remember now, barely remember anything but this cold darkness - it’s not good enough.

It’s that thought that he builds on. He can reassemble himself like any other weapon he has and he does it now, _snap click_ of confidence and good ol’ Winchester badassery instead of metal. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done. It feels like tearing off his own limbs, sinew and nerves separating and peeling away into nothingness. He can feel the demon recoil, curious until it feels him prying himself open, letting it in.

_Come and get me, you son of a bitch,_ he thinks dimly. _Willing, I’m willing, cocksucker. Me for Sam. It’s a good trade. No meat on ‘im anyway._

He doesn’t mind so much when it finally spins thought and awareness and life away from him. He just wishes he didn’t have to be alone.  


 

  
  


 

And Sam is crying. The world tilts underneath him and he’s on his hands and knees, disbelief wracking his body, snot streaming down his face, no no no no. He can’t think at all, his fingers and shoulders and face tingling with cold and panic and that single pulse of denial. He chokes on blood and bile and it fills his mouth and nose, burning its way out of his body.

But then his hair settles down around his face and even the little flutter against his battered skin is enough to make him look up, panicked, because that means the _wind is dying down_. The hellmouth is still for a long moment and then it begins to bubble backwards, withdrawing back into the earth like someone’s hit the rewind button. It gurgles and something pops underneath the surface, flinging wet clods of earth into the air. The gnawing bands around his chest are gone.

Sam cries out and then he is moving, scrabbling forward on hands and knees, slipping on the slick grass. He’s sobbing words out and not hearing any of them, calling Dean’s name, calling him every foul word he can think of. His knees hit the hellmouth’s receding edge and sink immediately but Sam keeps moving anyway, shoveling frantically at the dirt with his bare hands, his spine curved above the hellmouth like a bow. It fights him. It pushes him away and he falls sideways. His shoulder hits the ground. The mud sucks at him and for one panicked moment he doesn’t think he’ll be able to pull free until it lets go with a pop, overbalancing him. He almost falls again.

His hands are so cold that every movement is like sliding his fingers against knives. They could be bleeding; there’s blood on the earth that could be his, heaved up from the torn lining of his stomach or dripping from the useless cross on his chest. He wipes at his face with his arm, digging blindly.  
  
Nothing. There’s nothing there. The ends of his hair trail along the ground and he’s choking on the smell of the thing but Dean isn’t there, he’s gone. And there’s nothing but silence and the sound of air hissing through Sam’s teeth.

“No,” Sam moans, “Dean, you fucker, you don’t get to do this. You don’t get to die on me, you piece of shit, you don’t get to -”

The words die in his throat. He shudders hard, eyes wide and unseeing. His hands still, pushed into the ground to his wrists, dirt and blood smeared across his face. There’s something below him, lingering even though the hellmouth is sealing itself up as though it was never there, regarding him with sick fascination. He reaches out to it and it shrinks away, and he thinks, _it’s you. You’re the one that’s got him._ He can almost _smell_ his brother on it somehow, as if it’s wearing Dean’s soul like an old jacket, and he grabs at it again, frantically. It skips out of his reach again, barely brushing against his mental fingertips.

Rage takes him as easily as terror, pushing itself through every nerve ending in his body. His hands clench around fistfuls of dirt and the thing comes closer. It touches him and it feels like dry ice catching and sliding across his skin. And for just a heartbeat he can feel startled recognition before he lunges forward with both mind and body and traps the thing close.

It’s like embracing death and a scream tears its way out of Sam’s throat before he can stop himself. He grits his teeth and hangs on regardless, Dean’s face fixed in his mind like a promise or a threat.

It’s a crude battle, clumsy and awkward. There’s a moment of perfect blankness, something snapping in his brain and his lips draw back from his teeth. Then there’s nothing but desperation and a sudden stabbing agony in his brain. Something passes through his grip and up into the air with a howl of triumph, through the hole that Sam has torn open to reach his brother again.

The hellmouth shrinks beneath his hands ( _closing it’s fucking closing_ ), and Sam sucks in foul air that has never been warmed by the sun. He has time to think of Dean and to spare a thought for a god that he doesn’t really believe in and then there are things without shapes crawling up from the chasm. They’re bright and ephermal and it turns his stomach to look at them.

And then, almost close enough to touch, there’s the palest sliver of skin, white enough that it looks like bone, and then the angle of a jawbone, stubble standing out clearly on dirt-smeared skin. That’s when the world breaks open and starts to turn again and Sam sobs with relief and grabs for his brother, one hand bracing below Dean’s jaw, the other groping for his collar. Collar to arms to waist and Sam is dragging Dean backwards, slipping over the grass.

He lets go of Dean long enough to dive for the duffel and the shotgun inside of it, but by the time he turns around, the shotgun braced against his shoulder, there’s nothing to shoot at. The earth shakes beneath his feet but the creatures that he glimpsed inside the hellmouth are gone. They never reached the surface; the walls of the hellmouth must have closed down around them the way it had tried to close around Dean’s body, tried to keep what it almost devoured.

Dean’s dead weight in his arms when Sam picks him up again, cold and unresponsive. Sam pulls him to the other side of the clearing before he lays him down underneath the same tree that Dean brought him to that morning. “Dean, hey,” Sam says, “Hey, hey. ” He wipes the dirt away from Dean’s face and it’s only when his hands pass over Dean’s mouth that he realizes that Dean isn’t breathing. He draws back and sees everything his eyes passed over in his panic. Dean’s lips are blue and his teeth are stained with blood, that his eyelashes are clumped togther with slivers of ice that glint coldly in the moonlight. Brakish water dribbles out of Dean’s nose and mouth.

Sam shuffles forward on his knees until he’s next to Dean’s shoulders, willing his hands to stop trembling. The chill of the night is drawing close again, forgotten for the long minutes when Dean was gone and Sam was alone, but the cold edge of his training settles over him. He tilts Dean’s chin back to open his airway and bends forward until his ear is next to Dean’s mouth. Nothing. Pinch the nostrils shut, one rescue breath - check for breathing - two - check again. Compressions. Hard and fast, twenty-eight twenty-nine thirty, check. Nothing. Again. Again. One breath - two - compressions, punishingly hard, Dean’s chest jerking beneath Sam’s folded hands. His mouth tastes like blood and dirt from what he’s forcing out of Dean’s throat. He doesn’t notice the tears that slide down his cheeks. Again. Waiting for some sign that he knows’ll be coming any second. Again.

He feels Dean jerk underneath his hands and he pulls back immediately. He’s almost quick enough to avoid what comes violently out of Dean’s body. He gets a hand under Dean’s shoulder and rolls him onto his side, holding his head still with the other as Dean vomits onto the ground. The liquid expelling itself from Dean’s mouth and nose is thick, nearly black in the moonlight. It could be ice or mud or things that Sam doesn’t want to think about, can’t think about. All he can do is press his face against Dean’s shoulder and try not to start bawling.  
  
He can feel Dean struggling weakly against him, his fingers digging into the dirt. “It’s ok, Dean, I got you, I got you,” Sam says over and over. Dean coughs and chokes and still more filth spills out of his mouth and nose, but when Sam works his fingers into Dean’s clenched fist, Dean holds on tightly. “It’s ok, it’s ok, I got you. You’re ok.”

“Sammy?” Dean croaks.

“Yeah, it’s me. You’re gonna ok. You’re gonna be ok, Dean,” Sam says. He pulls his sleeve over his hand and wipes Dean’s face, gently. Dean’s fingernails dig into his skin.

“Hellmouth,” Dean gasps, and spits onto the ground. Another spasm seizes him as Sam opens his mouth to answer, and they ride it out in silence until it passes.

“Closed,” Sam says. He leaves Dean’s side for the few brief seconds that it takes to scramble over to the duffel and he digs out some of the heat packs they carry, shaking them until they’re warm in his hands. “We gotta get your body temperature up before we move,” he says when Dean tries to sit up. “Sit still. You could have hypothermia.”

He lays the heat packs over Dean’s chest, keeping a hand over one to make sure it doesn’t overheat. Dean’s shivering violently now, which is encouraging. His eyes are heavy and glazed, which isn’t. Sam taps him lightly on the cheek with his open palm and Dean’s eyes snap back open. “Stay awake,” he says, and Dean’s mouth quirks to hear his own big brother tones coming out of Sam’s mouth. “You and head injuries, Dean. You better quit that.”

Dean’s response is the corners of his mouth being tugged upwards ever so slightly. “Nothin’ in there to damage anyway,” he whispers hoarsely.

Sam slaps him lightly again, and leans down and rests his forehead against his brother’s. “Don’t ever fucking do that to me again,” he whispers.

 

  
  


 

East. Their shadow strides behind them as the Impala rushes to meet the sunrise. Dean doesn’t wake up until they’ve already wound their way into Pacheco Pass and the smell of the ocean is miles behind them. Sam pulls over at Casa de Fruta and leaves Dean in the backseat, a blanket and a pillow stolen from the motel keeping him comfortable and warm. The fruit stand is an oasis in rolling hills of pale grass, nearly white in the morning light. It rustles in the wind

Sam turns nectarines over in his hand and inhales deeply. His whole body feels damp and raw, and his hands shake when he puts the fruit down and heads inside to find something that Dean will actually eat. There are people in chainmail and flowing dresses milling around inside, paritioned off into small groups and shooting barely-veiled glances at the costumes around them. Sam barely sees them.

He just - he can’t stop shaking. He could barely take his eyes off the rearview mirror on the way south, tracing over the line of Dean’s sleeping form every few minutes to make sure that his brother hadn’t disappeared again. Dean had been almost insensible by the time they’d gotten back to the motel, and Sam had nearly had to carry him up the three flights of stairs to their room. He was able to get his own clothes off but could do little more than sit quietly under the shower while Sam packed up their stuff. He crawled into the backseat and actually allowed Sam to push his legs up on the seat and lay a blanket over him. He hadn’t even let Sam do that when he was dying and that scares Sam more than Dean’s silence, more than the fact that Dean is still shivering.

A fat man dressed in tights and a codpiece turns around and leers at Sam as he gets in line to pay, and Sam grimaces vaguely at him. He can still smell vomit and blood on himself and he sort of wants to sniff under his arms surreptitiously, to see if it’s all in his imagination.

Dean is sitting on the back of the car when Sam gets back, juggling his purchases. He’s wrapped up in his thickest jacket and his collar is pulled up around his face. He doesn’t look over when Sam sits down next to him, tucking one foot up on the bumper. His eyes are trained far away, pale with the morning light or something else. He hasn’t said anything about what he saw or heard in the hellmouth, and Sam hasn’t really wanted to know.

He bumps Dean with his shoulder at last and extends a cup of coffee when Dean finally looks over. There’s a thick bandage across his cheek where something cut him open and it makes an odd sort of symmetry with the wound he received from Quintana’s whip, which curves down on the opposite side of his face, scabbed over.

The air is still chilly, not yet warmed by the sun that’s just barely peeking its head over the hills, but only Dean’s breath fogs. Sam doesn’t see it, his attention on a cut on his own hand that he missed somehow. “There’s a girl in there with dragon boobs,” he says eventually.

Dean starts and turns toward him, his brows knitted together. “What?”

Sam motions with two hands cupped around his chest, and grins. “Tattoos. You could balance a bowl of cherries on those things. I think even you’d run for cover.”

Dean’s chin tilts down towards his chest, and his laugh starts as a rumble in his chest. He grabs Sam’s wrist and turns his palm towards the sky, studying the faint pink lines that still curve over Sam’s hand. Most of the pigment washed off between getting Dean in the shower and getting him out of it but it’s clear enough in the sunlight. They sit like that for a while, Sam sipping his coffee, Dean’s fingers clenched around his own drink to keep them from trembling. His eyes flicker across the sprawling landscape, chasing phantoms or maybe nothing at all. There are shouts from the fields behind Casa de Fruta, gibberish except for the occasional cry of “Excelsior!” Dean flinches every time a car rumbles past them and every time there’s an especially sharp cry.

“You ok?” Sam asks.

Dean nods, pulling away. “Yeah. Just ready to be gone, dude.”

“Yeah, I know, I know - California sucks.”

Dean lifts an eyebrow. “Thought you liked it here.”

Sam shrugs. “What can I say, cornfields sound pretty good right now.”

Dean’s entire face splits into a grin at that, the first real expression Sam’s seen on him since he pulled Dean out of the hellmouth, bloodied and unmoving. It lights up his eyes and stretches the wounds on either side of his face. “Sammy,” he says, “it was worth all of it just to hear you say that.”

He only laughs when Sam asks him what he means, and slides off the Impala and into the passenger seat, and they chase the wandering dawn until there’s nothing but cornfields, as far as the eye can see.

  



End file.
